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Good point. They should be better than Texas...

Especially not when the team is 10-4...

And those boxes also show us how accurate many umpires are, Mr. Glass Half-Empty. I know I have said it before, but the job of a home plate umpire has always been to determine if a ball thrown anywhere from 80 to 100 mph touched any part of an imaginary box. It's not easy. Heck, it's not even easy to see a ball traveling at 100 mph. I am shocked at how often they get the borderline calls right (assuming the K Zone is right, of course). None of this excuses Angel Hernandez or Joe West, however. And nothing ever willl ...

At what point will Yankee fans realize the possibility that Frazier's "breakout" defensive season last year is probably due to a small sample size? He only played 280 innings in the OF, or maybe 5 weeks worth of action. Remember how good Chavis still looked after 280 PA, when he still had an OPS over .800? (It was .806.) I think Frazier's defense in 2020 is that type of small sample inaccuracy...

Weird, because when they expanded rosters to 26, there was supposed to be a limitation on pitchers at 13. That not in effect?

Boom, yes. Some proof Boone completely missed he point. The whole point of the "opener" was to use your better/best reliever against the opposing best hitters. That's why the Rays were using guys like Diego Castillo, Ryne Stanek and Sergio Romo in the role. The Yankees, with very good bullpen depth, still opt for the AAAA guy...

I could not agree more with this post without cloning technology...

And hey, in the 1990's, maybe this could have been Roger's walk-on song...

Also according to his Wikipedia page, Mike was not the original head writer. It’s not clear from that page whether or not he was even on the original writing staff...

Yes but no one watched the show back then because Mike was the head writer. He’s still doing that kind of thing online BTW...

The original is Joel...

I was also thinking this one:

So.... no shortstops between MLB and Peraza?

BuT I should add, if you are going to use a Neil young song, I strongly recommend this one, because, of his entire catalog, it's the one where he most sounds like a singing version of Mr. Hanky...

How about “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Chuck Berry?

For all the trash Yankee fans talk about the Sox farm, they don't seem to like using their own farm players. The only homegrown starters in the lineup are Gary Sanchez and Brett Gardner, and Gardner came up 13 year ago...

Standings are all that matters, as you said. "Power Rankings" are just something sports journalists do to help justify their existence with their publisher. "Hey I need you to fill this page with content we can also put on the website. Make it at least 800 words long." And the author can invoke the same inexact science and mystic arts that are overused and widely accepted when ranking college football teams. But at the end of the day, they are just some guy's opinion...

Maybe they did that for the power rankings. And the Sox are penalized for playing almost half their games against the Orioles?

I do frequently try to compare the changes in baseball to other sports and how they handle the situations. Maybe too often. But still, I'm going to do it again. In football - a sport with more rules regarding where players lineup than any other sport and possibly more than all other sports combined - we have seen defense make changes to take away all kinds of offense. I don't know when the prevent defense was started or who was the first coach to put in a nickelback. But I do know these changes were put in to take away some of the most exciting plays in the sport. There is nothing in football more exciting that watching the QB chuck the ball 60 yards downfield to complete a pass and either score a touchdown or at a minimum, get a first down (barring the extremely rare 3-and-61), yet when opposing teams threw double coverage or had extra players back there, we all understood. In fact, we hoped the offense would accept the challenge in front of them rather than complain about how it was ruining the game. But with baseball, suddenly, we don't want the defense to try and prevent scoring? Even though, unlike football, baseball fields do not have consistent and equal dimensions, they are still all very big and they are defended by the same number of players on every team. And maybe, like in football, they need to adjust how they handle the situation. For example. if a football team sees the team has 5 or 6 defensive backs aggressively taking away everything deep, then they have fewer players somewhere else. Hey, no linebackers in the box? Maybe time to run the draw play! And the shift has been around baseball for a long, long time. Even the Williams Shift itself actually predates the career of Ted Williams! It goes back to the 1920's when it was first used against Frederick "Cy" Williams. No one said a thing about it ruining the game for decades, as it was always simply viewed as defenses playing defense. The shift itself is primarily used against left-handed hitters aka the least common ones, but these are still among the best hitters in the world. Dropping down a bunt or going to other way with greater frequency - something many left-handed hitters are very capable of doing - should be the answer. If they are stacking right field, try to hit it to left. If the shortstop is up the middle and the third-baseman has the whole side to defend, go the other way. Hit it where they ain't. The real problem has been the philosophy of hitters and coaches and even some saber-metric types thinking "the one way to beat the shift is to power the ball over the shift. Launch angles and exit velocities are the key." No, those are the traps you have been falling into, because you're still attacking the teeth of the shift. No one shifts on the light-hitting second baseman with single digit home runs over his 5 year career. The players they shift on are players who do rank among the most dangerous hitters in the world and hitters who have made a career learning how to adjust around every prior strategy to nullify them. And they need to learn how to handle this strategy. And if enough of them master the art of hitting away from the shift, the shift will become a lot less prevalent. But until then. it's just defenses playing defense...

To be fair, the one game play-in was always an option in the event of a tie. It sounds like from your previous posts, you might have even seen the first one back in 1948(?).

Also only the second player in MLB history to be teammates with his own son...

Well, prior to 2016, it was not uncommon for opposing fans, primarily Cardinals's fans, to trash talk about the "Century of Losing". Brewers' fans are closer, but don't exactly have a lot of successes to brag about, so their trash talk focuses on the Packers. And be kind to fans of losing teams. It's easy to find a group of people get behind a team like the Yankees, who win every year. But the most dedicated baseball fans in my eyes are the peiople who rally behind teams like the Pirates, who have watched their ownership let MLB stack the odds against them and these fans know they are in for a long season, but get behind their team anyway. Weird story about Cardinals' broadcasts. In the 1980's, on rare occasions, I was able to pick up those games on my radio (like, a radio with an antenna - none of the internet stuff) when I was growing up in Massachusetts. I don't recall the station's call letters, but I would listen for a while until the signal faded, just in shock at how strong it must have been...

Confidence or not, a good manager cannot let his bench players simply rot on the pine until someone gets hurt. They need occasional action...

Ah yes, forerunner to baseballs' drug policy that had nothing to do with steroids. Who will ever forget the Pittsburgh Drug Trials and their highlights, such as Tim Raines' confession to sliding into bases head first because he had vials of cocaine in his back pocket, or members of the Pirates' bullpen, primarily the late Rod Scurry, testifying to meeting dealers during games, not to mention the man who should have the entire scandal named after him, Steve Howe, whose career included 1 Rookie of the Year Award and seven lifetime bans for drug violations. Oh, and 4 members of the KC Royals (Willie Wilson, Willie Aikens, Vida Blue and Jerry Martin) once spending the off-season in prison for possession of cocaine. The Good Old Days...

1. Bud Selig did that. 2. Not to me. Other sports play league-wide schedules, but I still enjoy the Super Bowl and NBA championship series. 3. Didn't that happen before interleague play, too? 4. I hope I do not need to re-state my opinion on this.