jung

Nope....I don't think I can find a single team particularly in the AL that is doing better. These issues are endemic to the way the game is played today. Some teams field better than others and that is the only area where I find some teams have not sacrificed in order to play the game the way it is played today. The Astros come to mind as a team that will field us into the ground if we meet them in the post season. In fact every other AL team we might face will field us into the ground other than the Yankees and maybe the Jays. If you don't care about fielding, you will cobble a team that fields like crap. It ain't rocket science. Even the best Pitchers in the game today with few exceptions are almost totally reliant on getting batters to chase pitches outside the zone in order to generate outs and virtually every hitter down to the 170lb soaking wet 2nd baseman is trying to crank the ball over the fence just about all the time. The issues are virtually endemic to the 21st Century game.

Welcome to MLB in the 21st Century. In many cases they were not even swinging at good pitches to hit...again welcome to MLB in the 21st Century.

Yanks ended up beating the Jays 7-2.

If the line I just brought up is correct that Yankee/Jays game is only in the 7th inning.

As usual the Sox swung at anything and everything tonight allowing Pitchers to employ the one trap left to the modern day pitcher, making the hitter swing at a pitch that is actually a ball. 7th and 8th innings were a joke. Middle of the Sox order did better in the 9th but to no avail. Meanwhile they stumble around in the field like drunken sailors.

Nice job at swinging at every f***ing thing under the sun Sox.

Football is an entirely different game. There is nothing about the games itself nor the financial aspects of them that make the two sport dynamics relevant to each other. As for the team "investment" in pitchers that would be tolerable if they had anything but crap to cover the 6th through 9th innings and in some cases the 5th through 9th innings and in other cases the 4th through 9th innings. As for total longevity, other than Sandy Koufax show me Starters from the 1950's through 1970's era that had relatively shortened careers when compared to the current crop of Starters and maybe YOU don't care how diluted MLB baseball has become, but I do.

Pitchers were not superhuman in that era, well maybe Ryan was superhuman, maybe Koufax. However pitchers relied on different assets in the later innings than they relied on in the early innings. I would not define what Starters did as pacing as much as it was strategizing to get to the later innings. Seems to me that we have few pitchers now that can set the stage to rely on different assets in the later innings than they showed in the early innings. Game analysts "talk" about a pitcher setting a batter up for the later innings but I see very little of it now. They are by and large out of the game before the later innings arrive. So Starters had a strategy for how to complete a game, how to have something left for the later innings and what that something would look like. Remember also that there was little of these 8-10 pitch AB's as well. Hitters would come to the plate in the later innings pretty much in a different place than they were in early in the game against a good starter. They had been knocked down, challenged and lost and fooled in just about that order. By the later AB's hitters no longer even had half the plate they started with. Maybe they were down to able to control effectively a quarter of the plate on the inner black AND at that point the pitcher was showing his full repertoire of pitches. Hitters were often left approaching the AB like the count was 0-2 as they stepped into the batters box.....well except for Teddy Baseball who had his process and those ridiculous, other worldly splits against RH pitchers. Nobody moved Ted off his process at the plate nor changed his swing which was at the heart of his process. The simple fact of pitching and hitting is that if a pitcher shows batters every damn thing including his underwear early in a game, it is very unlikely that his repertoire will be effective at the end of the game or even past the second time through the order. But Starters were always aiming to compete a game they started. That was their intent. You cannot tell me that today's starters intend completing a game start. They are not encouraged to and it appears not to keep them from earning enormous incomes. As for Ryan his body looked nothing like it did once he truly matured just as a man, never mind as a pitcher. The percentage of complete games he pitched rose significantly at that point. You will see the same thing repeated time and time again with good starters of that era. They come into MLB at 20 years old. In the main they know what they want to do but their bodies had not matured enough to do it. Then their bodies would catch up to their brains and they became capable of not just pitching complete games but dominating over complete games. Still and all I suspect that pitching has changed because in the main the talent level has changed in relation to the number of franchises. There simply are not enough pitchers to go around that can even manage strategizing to complete a game because they don't have either the head for it, the body for it and are not encouraged either by coaches or the financial aspect of baseball to do it. Thus the entire pro game IMO has adapted much to its detriment to the number of teams.....over expansion. My perennial feeling is that really really great baseball players are alien kings from other planets and good baseball players are just not from this world either. How many aliens from other planets do we think are walking amongst us and how many of them decide to play baseball? It is that kind of game....as in hard as s*** to play well.

Aha....sorry....did not get where you were going. They actually got stronger as the game went on at least through 7 innings. There was not this prevailing tendency to show the hitters everything early. Pitchers would establish the FB and they would show you that they owned one side of the plate or the other. Hitters only got one half of the plate. If they reached out over the plate and the pitchers wanted the outer half, they were either drilled or driven back off the plate or made to dance in the batter's box. In certain circumstances the pitcher would throw right at the hitter's hands. Good luck doing much with that. If you were more of a neutral hitter not trying to have access to the entire plate, you would be driven back to the point where you could barely see the outer black much less hit something out there. Thus those hitters were vulnerable to called strikes on the outer black. Honestly there was much more challenge pitching and many more swinging strikes as a result. After establishing that you as a hitter were not going to just be able to do what you wanted to do, then pitchers would work in their secondary pitches and then the hitter was really f***ed. The hitter is just trying to remember if the the pitcher is going to drill him or throw at his hands and now here comes Uncle Charlie or a Slider. Breaking stuff is how pitchers got their called strikes in those days. By the end of games pitched by really good pitchers hitters no longer even had half the plate. They were just hoping not to be carried back to the dugout on a stretcher. Willy Mays told the story of facing Bob Gibson one day and forgetting that it was Gibson out there on the mound. Mays loved to really dig in at the plate and as a general rule spent all kinds of time excavating the batter's box to his particular liking. Willy finally looked up preparing for the pitch and suddenly remembered that he had left Bob Gibson out there stewing while he excavating the batter's box. Gibson hated hitters digging in and would drill you just because if you did that. Mays quickly asked for time, filled in the holes he had just made and retook a stance in the box. Pitchers were flat mean. They were virtually all mean. Either they scared the daylights out of you at the plate or they had such control that they cut you to ribbons and made you look like a fool in the batter's box. Hitters had to work pitchers into a favorable count for the hitter and then be ready when they were challenged. Also much much more pitching inside. You seldom saw these 8-10 pitch AB's either. The pitchers had hitters so off balance that they just could not hack away fouling off pitch after pitch. The mental conflict between hitter and pitcher was entirely different. Hitters knew that pitchers did not care about drilling a hitter and putting him on first base. Hitters knew that the pitcher's perspective was "OK I got your buddy over there limping to first base. You want some of the same? I will hit you if you like and you can limp on down to first." A guy like Stanton would not be allowed to survive. Stanton would be a sniveling wreck after one at bat and would likely not recover for the remainder of his at bats that day. I firmly believe that pitchers of that era would literally upchuck if they saw somebody like Garrit Cole with two outs and nobody on and a 3-2 count purposefully throw a Slider off the plate outside trying to induce the hitter to swing at what was a ball even though a take would mean a walk. They would sooner die than do that. All by way of saying that pitchers had the talent to throw inside effectively and on their terms. Hardly any of the pitchers we have today have the talent to do that. Their "talent" is getting the hitter to swing at something that is actually not a strike. Its about the only trap they can set for hitters. They are all too often either throwing a pitch that is not actually going to land in the strike zone or they are throwing an utter pile of crap pitch that is going to be hit to the moon.

Gaylord Perry had 29 complete games in back-to-back seasons in 1972 and ’73 and followed that with 28 in ’74. From 1970-79, 58 pitchers had 20 or more complete games. In 1971, ’72, and ’76, eight pitchers each year completed 20 or more games. From 1950-80, 36 pitchers completed 25 or more games. If you really want to see examples of complete games for Starters from 1950 to present day, Baseball Almanac has the league leaders for each year. And its not so much a "back in the day" sort of thing if you don't consider the 1960's and 1970's back in the day. Back in the day for me is the 1950's. the 1960's and 1970's does not seem that long ago for me. Also if they were pitching that many complete games, you can well imagine how many times starters got past the 5th and 6th innings. One rotation of starters probably pitched close to as many innings as an entire division worth of staters today.

It is worth complaining about or at least trying to get somebody to address because people no longer even know how to watch a baseball game....what kinds of made and missed plays matter, how the game should be played. We have guys coming up to the Majors now that only care about hitting. You can tell from their complete ineptitude at doing anything else and that is one sad state of affairs.

Who dictated that Staters should become the equivalent of Sprinters and why??????

Cart before the horse. Pitchers used to be able to get through the batting order a 3rd time enough for people to notice. Now its as rare as hens teeth and the number of relief pitchers that just go right off a cliff edge after 15-20 pitches is just remarkable. They can't do it even with a day of rest. So No, I would not recommend Managers demand of their pitchers what they can no longer do. The point is pitchers can no longer do what was once commonplace. Everyday players cannot do what was once commonplace for everyday players for that matter. Like field the baseball, throw to the right base, run the bases, bunt etc, etc, etc.

I don't think it possible to cover this level of performance degradation in the COVID Pandemic time element. This has been a decline over a much longer timeline than that. At the very least it starts with the establishment of the so-called "quality start" as a means to reward 6 innings for Starters. It continues with the establishment of the so-called "opener", meaning a pitcher that cannot even get through the batting order more than once if that. Now, getting more than 6 innings from a Starter is a rarity. In fact, just over 5 innings is the norm. 5 innings is quite acceptable and considered ":good". Now if a Starter can at least make it through four innings he is not considered to have failed. I don't know how to even establish a standard for these so-called openers. What......once though the order and you are golden?

It is actually getting hard to care about MLB at all the way it is being played currently. As both Splinter and I have commented in the past, there is simply not enough baseball talent out there to support this many franchises. There just isn't and we keep kidding ourselves that these guys are better ballplayers because they are on balance stronger ballplayers. I would refine that to be more muscular ballplayers, not necessarily stronger or more fit. The consequence is that the actual baseball being played suffers more and more as the years pass. The most critical element is the pitching which is laughable now. Everything that happens on a baseball diamond starts with the ball in the hands of the pitcher. Hence as the quality of pitching declined it should have been obvious that the quality of the game itself would suffer. That has been exacerbated by the juiced baseball. While pitchers no longer challenge hitters nor back them off the plate, nor move the hitters feet in the batters box, pitchers do throw trash pitches right over the heart of the plate with predictable results. There are now three pitch types we see regularly: - trash pitches right over the heart of the plate that are not efforts to challenge hitters....they are just crap pitches - pitches designed to lure hitters into the one remaining trap the modern day pitcher has, a pitch designed to induce the hitter to swing at a pitch that is actually a ball - Pitches that are so far off the plate that they cannot even induce a swing from a hitter The cumulative result of bad pitching and the juiced baseball is a game where fielding no longer counts, base running no longer counts, hitters swing as hard as they can every swing regardless of the count and don't much care or can judge whether the pitch is worth a swing or not plus rosters filled with pitchers that might MIGHT give you 10-15 worthwhile pitches any given night before they turn into pumpkins. What has become "exciting" about today's game is whether a fielder can field a simple pop up, whetter he will throw to the right base or not and whether the base runners will have not f***ed it up so badly that it does not matter where the ball is thrown and OH of course, the distance and mph of some HR or another. The absurd current rules of baseball are in effect the last straw. None of what is passing for "interesting" baseball today is more than just barely watchable from my perspective.

That is a night by night phenomenon though. WE SWING AT EVERYTHING EVERY NIGHT. I doubt there is an umpire or an umpiring process that will keep a team of hitters that swings at everything to have plate discipline. We even know we swing at everything. Why do you think the Fenway PR spin machine immediately spooled up the Schwarber narrative about "having a positive influence regarding Sox plate discipline"? Unfortunately ours are not the only hitters with poor plate discipline. We just happen to have an entire team mostly filled with hitters that exhibit no plate discipline at all. Lets see for hitters with any plate discipline we have X and the newly acquired Schwarber and ......X and the newly acquired Schwarber and .... How many times have we said this year "if the hitter would just keep his bat on his shoulders this bum on the mound would simply walk guys around the bases until he is pulled". First and foremost, I blame the quality of pitching in MLB. Everything in baseball starts with the ball in the pitcher's hand. Pitchers no longer challenge hitters. Even the best of them, like Cole the other night no longer challenge hitters. Hitters don't want to draw walks all night. They want to hit. Second....I blame the juiced baseball. At best we are back to the 2018 baseball this year which was still a wildly juiced baseball.

Good point...simply means the entire game has gone downhill. WE SWING AT ANYTHING...which is our problem. WE fall right into the only trap the modern day pitcher has.....get you to swing at a pitch that is actually a ball!

And as for. MLB fielding....don't get me started.

I just do not get why pitching is so s***** in MLB. They don't do anything other than try to fool the hitter into swinging at a ball. They challenge NOBODY. They scare NOBODY. They can't pitch inside to save their skins. Every team has 100 pitchers, none that can pitch more than 10-15 pitches at best before they are done. I actually don't know why there are not more HR's. more RBI's, higher OPS's.

Atta' way Sox...just keep grooving pitches to Stanton happy and secure in the batter's box.

Have avoided listening to ARod all season. Just being reminded why tonight.

Stanton is NOT Ortiz...not even close. Knock Ortiz down and he will make you pay. Knock Stanton down and he has to stop sniffling first. That might not happen the entire rest of the game.

So does somebody want to explain to me why pitchers are not making Stanton uncomfortable in the batter's box? It is not even hard to do!!!!! Even just making him move his feet will give him the hebe-jebees.

What is the matter with today's pitchers. Even Cole, one of the best, with a 7 run lead throws a 3-2 Slider to Hernandez trying to get him to swing at a pitch that is out of the zone......WITH A 7 run lead and two outs!!!!! I really don't understand how the game is being played these days. It is some game other than baseball.

finally actual Major league teams to play. If I had to guess at this point, I think the Jays are likely to get past either the Yanks or us. Hopefully, the Yanks are the team that gets passed.