jad

Now if I remember correctly (a big IF!) such a study (an extensive one) was done on basketball players and the notion of the 'hot' shooter. What that study found was that there was no such thing. All that was out there were different quality shooters: the ones with high shooting percentages had more and longer 'hot' streaks than those with low shooting percentages. Duh. Larry Bird would appear to get 'hot' (i.e., have more baskets in a row), than, say, Bo Outlaw. And both groups performed pretty much as statistics would indicate. (eg., as the most obvious example, a guy say with a 50% shooting average had the same groupings of 'hits' and 'misses' and extended 'streaks' as would a series of coin flips. Of course all of us have had the illusion of 'streaks'. 'I just can't miss'! 'I'm seeing the ball really well!' 'The fairways look wide!' But we tend to think this AFTER the fact. (As for me, given that I'm a mediocre athlete, whenever I get this feeling, I almost inevitably screw up--now that may be due to pressure, or it may simply be due to the fact that I suck, and eventually that will show up. No matter how hot or cold I'm feeling, my golf score is remarkably stable!)

That's a very cool bit of history!

Or game 7 or 1967; or 7 in '86 ... And all I know of the earlier decades is another game 7 where "Pesky holds the ball!"

Ha ha! I.e., "it doesn't exist." So the RS win 10 in a row. You would say "they have momentum." Then they lose; you say, "they lost momentum." If it has no predictive value, then it's meaningless. There was no "momentum"; there was a series of wins, then losses. To prove 'momentum,' you really need to do a mathematical study to discover whether a team that has won 2/3/4/5 or however many in a row has a chance of winning the next one that is greater than that same team's winning% after winning fewer than that in a row or after a loss. I assume this has been done: it's not a difficult mathematical problem. But I need to see the results of that before I believe this. It's like announcers in a close football game exclaiming "Wow! The constant momentum shifts in this game are amazing!"

If 'momentum' can 'change change in an instant', then 'momentum' obviously does not exist.

Why? The very evidence you cite shows them going from 1st to 6th in two years. They didn't get that way through liberal spending.

Although that 420-foot double-play wasn't badly struck.

Major league hitters are unable to hit a normal women's softball pitch. There are some amusing youtube videos of them trying.

so why couldn't Vasquez tag a guy when he was essentially standing at the plate w/ the ball waiting for him?

Yes, I've heard that as well. As I recall, it's when the eyes/brain switch from 'distance' to 'close-up'. What I remember reading was that that was also what was responsible for the batter's belief that a fast-ball has a 'hop': what they were experiencing was the shift in the way their vision tracked the ball.

This suggests that just moving the mound back might not be enough? Is it the amount of time that it takes for a 98mph to get to the plate? or the difficulty of picking up something moving that fast?

Why, if J.H. were planning on resetting, then going over the cap next season, would he have hired a G.M. whose special skill is producing competitive teams at minimal cost? I'm not saying he did or didn't plan that. It just seems that if that was the plan, Bloom would not have been the first pick.

No worries. I've been a native speaker for over 70 years and I have no clue who Norm Crosby is nor will I feel bad when anyone attempts to correct that ignorance.

The worst offender was Youkilis. Until Manny offered to beat the crap out of him for it. (The only thing I regret about Manny's career was that he was denied the opportunity to do that.)

We need to go back to that mindset of the late 50s and 60s, even the 70s, when our goal was a .500 season! (Or perhaps that's just what I remember. It never occurred to me that the RS would ever be in the Post season until 1967, and from that point on, ok, once every ten years losing a critical game 7? That's life!)

? If the 'whole point of a baseball season is to win a WS,' it's hard to imagine how anyone could have been a RS fan in the 20th century. Winning a WS is NOT the 'whole point' of any baseball season as far as fans are concerned, or they would have been stupidly wasting the thousands and thousands of hours they have been listening to the radio, watching a screen, or even sitting at a game.

No command? I think you're wrong (he hasn't gotten the call on some really close pitches).

So? How many WS will they have before that happens? And does the fact that the RS "reset" last year somehow discredit the rings they won before that?

They have been making 60-90mil/year, until last year, when they claim to have lost $116mil. Given that the value of their franchise has grown 1.6billion in the last decade, I'm not going to agree with Kimmi that "teams should not go all in to such an extreme extent." Why not?

No more fitting punishment can be imagined for a professor who demands revisions in a master's thesis (or who assigns one in the first place) than reading revisions in a master's thesis.

What was THAT??

They're just pandering to us; we can't handle the truth.

YeahbutwhaddaboutRESET?

Damn this guy can throw. Everything on the black. I hope he screws up tonight, though.

Your wish ...