jad

It was pretty much Bloom's way of proving that the only long-term deals will be to "his" guys, not to those dead-beats like Bogaerts and Devers who were here before him.

Why fire the guy who was done exactly what he was hired to do? In case of failure, you already have the fall guy (Cora) in place who you can certainly replace with some assistant to the assistant from Tampa and save another boatload of money.

I dunno. Sometimes, I guess, you have to sacrifice. Like, we need to realize the importance of making lots of money, and to do that you need to learn and exercise fiscal responsibility. And if you want to be 'successful' at that, sometimes you need to give up once important things--things like friends and family, your best employees, Mookie, Bogaerts, and replace your friends with accountants and your players with .200 hitters. As for the fans, think how great it will be for them to walk down to the ole ball park and get a ticket on game day! Maybe, if enough people stop going, you can even lower ticket prices! If the Reds can do it, there's no reason it can't happen in Boston.

Yup. Only with one difference: Bloom clearly wants to put a stamp on this team, getting "his" guys (e.g., Story--or one of them, not sure whether it's the one making 140million or the one who was 0-4 today and is hitting .202), and getting rid of deadwood, i.e., guys associated with a different GM (you know, like Betts, and soon Devers and Bogaerts).

Losses have become so much the norm that they seem a given: the basic conditions under which you follow the RS. So now that there is no expectation of winning, we can relax, kick back, and enjoy the way ownership is lining their pockets, without regard to success or (curiously) the satisfaction of customers. So yeah, got to see a great throw by JBJ last night, a 4 K performance yesterday by a superstar, plus watching Ohtani. Life is good

No idea. But from how they were talking, I just assumed it was an alternate crew for the RS.

Oh well. I guess it could be worse. The WS could have scored 2 or 3 in the first inning. The dog could have peed on the carpet.

Damn, the Dodgers are 16-7. Wouldn't it be great to be a big market team? And get to see generational players like Mookie Betts play every day?

After this, I'm off to yard the weed.

Well, we were curious what a Bloom RS team would look like ... I just didn't think we'd reach Bobby Valentine levels so quickly.

Yeah, the old 'humid air is heavier than clear air' myth.

If they did, even under the best case, wouldn't they still be barely a .500 team?

Just a quick search: the only study I found in my cursory search was one over the past twenty years or so, and it found that roughly 55% of dh were sweeps, 45% splits. Need help from a mathematician here, but it seems to me, if you took any 2 games at random, you have 50% chance of winning the first, and 50% the second. So each team has a 25% chance of sweeping. I.e., the chances of a 'sweep' by either team are 50%. Looks to me that in the 'real world', there are more sweeps than would be expected mathematically; thus historically, it's a better bet that the dh will be a sweep than that it will be split. (This will be true regardless of a team's record--obviously for a team with a dismal record, the chances of a sweep by that team will be very low. For the RS tonight, somewhere around 20%). It's quite possible I'm wrong here as it has been over a half-century since i flunked statistics.

Absolutely! In weather and in life. Don't sit on your ass today thinking tomorrow everything will clear up! As for winning double-headers, do you know the statistics on this? (A fairly easy problem: is a team's record in double-headers significantly different from that team's record in general. I suspect it is not, even though we all believe it is.)

Latest weather has it clearing late (by game time), so they'll likely play, no?

Ha ha! How is this 'nothing against Cora'? Dear Alex--nothing personal now, you've done great. But you're fired. Always--for JH

I don't understand the difference between 'stats' and 'results'.

I guess that he was just following the rule: Never make the first or last out of the inning at third.

Has Cordero ever played 1B before?

Remind me the case against robo-umps?

Yup. Get rid of everyone. That will be 7 or 8 more reasons not to watch them.

Yeah, but you're ignoring all those years he spent in the lab, studying microbiology and epidemiology.

That plate appearance by Dalbec has to be among the worst ABs of the season.

Right! (I knew in the end we basically agree.)

OK. So your response "100% irrelevant" refers not to the invocation of wins in the statement that 'wins are irrelevant' ? rather what is irrelevant is "the statement that wins are relevant"? This is a nuanced distinction that may not be within my mental abilities to unpack. In any case, my point is that you've already baked in 'wins' as a primary factor in computing a player's value (isn't that what the W stands for?). "Wins" (real or imagined) is what it's all about. What I'm saying (on the matter of retaining players or letting them go) is that for an owner (and for a lot of fans), wins is NOT what it's all about. (Take an example from a team I despise: the Lakers in 2021-22. Ownership hardly gives a crap about LeBron's WAR [if basketball has such a thing]; nor do they care what Westbrook's shooting percentage is. The 'value' of these players is that they pack the Staples Center each and every night. Fans may pretend to care about ownership finances, but they only care about that as it is reflected in team success. Owners likely care about a number of other things, including the popularity of their team and how much income individual players can be imagined to contribute to that.)