Maxbialystock

OK. I've seen enough. Holt needs to get tested. This is not our Brock Holt.

Well done, Pom. Not clean, but we absolutely will take it.

Would have been nice.

I'll chip in.

Road game. So no. Delicate psyches in our rotation.

Huge triple by JBJ. That passed ball was actually strike well inside the strike zone. He still would have gotten home of Betts ran to 1B and beat the throw.

Good stuff. Credible.

The worst team in baseball has won 6 of their last 12 games. Last night the Sox looked just as bad against the Jays. Porcello and Eovaldi both apparently decided to mail it in. Or they are terrified of pitching on the road.

Could not agree more. None of this is Eovaldi's fault because he is an innocent bystander. I think one of the announcers said he heard that Cora also forgot to tell Eovaldi he should try to pitch well tonight. Just a little bit of encouragement from the manager makes all the difference.

Right. It's never, ever the pitcher's fault. If only the manager would throw the right switch--here in the 3d inning--all will be well. If you truly believe that, you are wrong. Believe it or not, you win because the players play the game well and not because the manager makes some magical move.

This looks like two straight games in which our starters looked at their press clipping too long an forgot you got to go out there and earn it each and every time. The danger is that this lackadaisical approach can infect the whole team. If the starters don't give a s*** to prepare properly, why should the hitters? I hope the above is entirely inaccurate, but I was listening to the Orioles announcers on the radio, and they said Workman was warming up. In the 2d inning. Whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant. The great Eovaldi, much like the great Porcello, has now given up 5 runs in 2.1 innings.

All due respect--and I mean that--but nothing is leveling the playing field any more than it already is. Good pitchers already prosper and bad ones get beat up. Good hitters already hit and bad ones don't. None of that, I assure you, will change when robot umps take over. I'm serious when I say you are confusing that superimposed strike zone with some kind of transcendent truth. And in the process of attaining it you are advocating sidelining the umpires who will in fact become more and more marginalized because what's really important about baseball is what we see on that screen and the endless replays that allow us to achieve the nirvana on knowing who really was out or safe and which pitch really did nick the strike zone in exactly the right way.

Know anything about basketball? Ever heard of the 3 second violation inside the paint? Basketball did that because it opened up the court. Ditto the three pointer. The MLB rule book was created to make sense of the game and to keep it interesting. Thus have mounds been lowered, DH's added in the AL, etc. Still not much of a breakthrough on speeding up the game because pitchers and hitters and even managers resist it because so much hangs on every pitch and situation.

All due respect, but just how, exactly, is "standardized ball and strike calling" going to bring baseball back to a presumed golden age before all these shifts, focus on dingers, relievers coming in early, etc? I'm with cp176 in wanting to keep baseball a human endeavor, which means fallible human umpires. Those superimposed strike zones, which I look at right along with everyone else, are not the reality the robot ump advocates think they are. Reality is standing at that plate--or behind it or looking at it from the mound--and trying to be ready for a wide variety of angles, speeds, etc which will be coming at your or which you are trying to cause happen. Reality is seeing basically the same strike zone be Porcello's friend one night against the vaunted Yankees lineup one night and his enemy five nights later against the Jays. I firmly believe that standardized calls on balls and strikes will not make baseball one iota better. By taking umpires out of the central act of all baseball games, it will render whatever else they do increasingly irrelevant. I am already sick and tired of seeing, several times a game, the umpires all huddled around someone with a phone to experts in NYC who are reviewing replays and making decisions on calls. One recent trend I like is that these days they are less likely to reverse a call that was really close, which will discourage managers from gratuitous challenges.

Pretty good game thread for a loss. Well done. everyone.

Of just one thing I feel certain but can never prove. If Butler had started behind the plate, every single run would have been blamed on him. In other words, there is only so much a good catcher can do to keep (or get) his pitcher in a groove. Tonight Porcello proved just how important command of your pitches is and how narrow the gap between brilliant and just plain awful.

Really good point because it's the hitting that is broken tonight. Porcello pitched another brilliant game and was just unlucky with the lack of run support.

six righties including Leon. Plus I think Holt hits lefties better than righties.

Thanks.

Right now Kimbrel, Barnes, and Velazquez all have about the same WAR: 1.9, 1.8, and 1.6. Why would DD want to pay a king's ransom for the 1.9 guy?

I had to laugh.

Great point, and thanks for the reminder. He sure did.

Keep it up and you could get to 22 catches.

Well, that's a--what did I read in last night's game thread?--travesty. Another rookie mistake. Will this nightmare never end?

Not to me. I want human umpires because to me they are part of the game. FWIW, I even get a little nervous about how increasingly important computer programs and "big data" are becoming to MLB and even college teams. They are already the proximate cause for the all those shifts we see now. They are at the heart of the movie Moneyball, which depicts a GM who basically preaches the gospel of Bill James: get a walk because you don't need to hit; don't steal; don't bunt either because outs are precious. Think about that sentence and ask yourself, if Bill James is right and everyone starts applying sabermetrics religiously, is baseball a better game without bunts, without steals, and without hitters who actually want to hit a round ball with a round bat squarely and not just look for a walk?