jung

See how Albert could not use his back to get to that throw from 3rd. Pretty amazing that Albert is out there at all....then again, any broken down horse will do for this era of MLB.

MLB pitching is hysterical in this era and you really cannot canonize the hitters when the pitching is this bad and the baseball is a rocket ship. Sorry Mr Manfred.

Best job by Taylor that inning...walking Trout. Upton is a laughable player. I would love to see a team made up of all my favorites. Iggy and Machado playing on the same left side of some poor slob manager's infield. Upton in the OF. Machado would nonchalant a play in the hole so badly that he could not even Ole' the ball and almost spectacular plays are not Iggy's thing so he would boot it. That would give us the pleasure of seeing Iggy glare menacingly at Machado and Manny laugh hysterically right in his face. Meanwhile Upton would take advantage of the opportunity to sit down in the OF and massage his poor widdo toesie. I am sure I could fill in the other positions with more complete s***-heads. It ain't hard these days.

And that is the Upton we know so well, another turkey if there ever was one. 72 games missed with turf toe. Ah-huh

Upton has to know this will be another FB

Does anybody know if the surgery Albert had on his back was a spinal fusion. He sure moves around like it...especially in the batter's box.

Good chance this ump will be hearing it from both dugouts tonight. I love those games.

I think we are fortunate Trout was walked there. Taylor had no chance.

Then your alternative would be giving it to the player surrounded by better ballplayers. There is no in-between in this instance. You either favor giving the award to the player that appears to have had the best year or the player who appears to have contributed greatly to a "successful" team effort. I simply think they mis-named the award. You can make that argument. But I don't think it will get you very far as that decision is several decades old.

IMO you have to watch Trout play in the field and in the batter's box to really appreciate his game. For example he swings at fewer crap pitches than any other ballplayer I see today including JD. He goes to the plate with the same mentality about picking his pitch and staying away from the garbage every AB. There is virtually nobody else doing that in today's game. Then there are his instincts on the base paths and in the field which at least as good as anybody playing.

The place I generally go for lineups has Josh Taylor v Dillon Peters.

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.

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.

Need I repeat that JD is no longer an OF of any sort other than EMERGENCY.....Neither Mookie nor Beni are CFers because they do not get even decent jumps as CFers. In fact, neither one has a frigging clue where the ball is going when in CF. Only natural since it is a vastly different field to play than corner OF. I am sure that WTF is proud of himself because he once again did not make any of the called for defensive replacements and still won this game if only barely and v the woeful Angels. Yes folks, (this is me talking, so you knew this had to be coming) the dif between Corner OF and CF USED TO BE masked to a greater degree by the general level of quality of the guys playing MLB OF. But this is Manfred-ball now, where pitching sucks.....fielding at a MLB level is barely tolerated. But all hail the HR!!!!!! And don't think the shift DOES NOT make fielders even worse because the shift replaces good fielding skills with sitting your fielder's fat ass right were the ball is likely to come to earth if the ball has the unmitigated gall not to make it over the fence.

Amazed that Taylor got back in the count with Trout. We might have just seen Taylor's stint of the year to this point.

I have got to wonder if Cora told Nate to go out there in the 4th and empty the tank which would be interesting on its own merits considering how much work our pen gets. Nate sure threw like he was told to empty the tank in the 4th.

The interesting thing about that is that Nolan would have been able to pitch more innings than these stupid managers and the spread sheet geeks that feed their thinking would allow him to pitch were he pitching today.

Pitch count might end up being an issue for Nate of how many stints we can get out of him before he goes back up on the shelf. Nate tends to need to get rolling and there has rarely been a time in his career when he has been able to do that. We will probably be lucky to get 15 starts out of him a season....20 at best and that is where the contract becomes an issue. Is Nate really a $1.2M per start pitcher? Doubt it.

This is what I love about Nate. There is no give in the guy. He is all challenge all the time. We hardly have any pitchers on this team that pitch like that. He belongs in the rotation. Not real interested in the Bullpen s*** when it comes to Nate. The real question is how long will he hold up. Tends to be as fragile as a carton of eggs. But I love the way he throws.

1. Mookie Betts ® CF 2. Rafael Devers (L) 3B 3. Xander Bogaerts ® SS 4. J.D. Martinez ® RF 5. Sam Travis ® DH 6. Andrew Benintendi (L) LF 7. Christian Vazquez ® 1B 8. Brock Holt (L) 2B 9. Sandy Leon (S) C 1. Brian Goodwin (L) LF 2. Mike Trout ® CF 3. Shohei Ohtani (L) DH 4. Albert Pujols ® 1B 5. Kole Calhoun (L) RF 6. David Fletcher ® 3B 7. Andrelton Simmons ® SS 8. Luis Rengifo (S) 2B 9. Max Stassi ® C

I watched a little of this game. Rockie's starting pitcher was typically hideous. Had two pitches and didn't know how to throw one of them. Look TREVOR, that is not how you throw a Change. My God I was not a pitcher and I know that is not how you throw a Change. What kills me about guys throwing Changes without pronating is that all of us that played the game for any length of time pronate all the time. Watch Walker in the NESN booth or on the studio panel talk with his hands. He is pronating his wrists all the time whether his old glove hand or his throwing hand because that is what guys do throwing the ball unless a pitcher throwing a pitch that does not require it. However just throwing a baseball around the infield or from outfield to infield is always best done with some pronation. They have thrown so many baseballs by the time they get into their 40's and 50's that talking with their hands becomes just more pronating. Its muscle memory by then. They always look like they are trying to push through a revolving door. I no longer know how some of these guys get to the MLB as pitchers except to say there are simply not enough actual pitchers to go around at this point.

I just couldn't watch. Trying to keep my dog alive is wearing me out though I never give up on these issues until there is no choice. That said, I just could not bring myself to care about a game between the worst pitching team in MLB in a year when the pitching is generally hideous and the best hitting team in MLB even when one of the teams is MY TEAM! Seemed gratuitous to me, sort of like gratuitous violence in a movie. How could the Rockies possibly win that game? How could it even be an interesting game? I do think Porcello is coming to terms with what he need do to at least be a nominally worthy MLB pitcher for somebody in 2020. That said considering the way MLB pitching has gone, I don't even know that I can fathom what that might mean in 2020. Might not make tonight's game either as the extra rest is doing me a world of good.

I am desperately worried that we will trade DHern and I am equally worried that we will keep him and hobble him in the process. How is that for a confidently offered musing? Even Weber could be better than he is if we actually knew how to work with pitchers. BJ misses barrels. He just does not miss enough of them. That could have its genesis in a very specific issue that nobody is effectively helping him to resolve since the pitches he throws that land smack in the middle of the plate look like they are gong to land there as soon as they leave his hand. I would actually keep Weber before I kept BJ and would as soon throw both Weber and BJ overboard while truly rueing seeing DHern go. If DHern went out the door, I would be simply waiting for the day when he returned in an enemy uni pounding us senseless.

I heard some number the other day and I cannot even remember whether I was listening to the radio or watching the TV or what the f*** I was doing. That didn't stick...but the numbers stuck: We apparently won 52 games started by Sale and Price last year. This year.......13 games!

Ya' got me....them and the popcorn vendors!