Hank Chinaski

exposure therapy to treat your Lance McCullers PTSD?

In fairness, Manfred seems like a dipshit.

I mean, yes, but it’s not like baseball is the only area in which we ascribe meaning to randomness. I might argue that the human condition itself is ascribing meaning to randomness. As a species we are generally loath to acknowledge that randomness plays much of a role in our life outcomes, and our ascribed narratives or meaning (constructed to replace any possibility of randomness) coming into conflict with others’ leads to most of our social problems. So why do we care about the coin flip? Hell, isn’t the coin flip all we really have? All that is to say that, as much as I love LMJ and his postseason performances to date, I don’t think he has any magic in him in October. I think he’s a really good pitcher, whatever month it happens to be.

I’m not much of a believer in a guy being meaningfully different in October than in April-September. This came up in the Jeter thread…Jeter has almost the exact same numbers in the postseason as his career regular season numbers - both large sample sizes. There is a belief that that actually means he hit better in the postseason because he faced better pitching. I don’t know that that is true - seems like an assumption. It seems more likely that, over enough PAs in the wild card era, the quality of pitching faces in the postseason was probably similar to what he faced in 20 years of regular season games - and the fact that the numbers are almost identical supports that. Certainly I get the logic/hypothesis, it is intuitive, just not sure it has been tested. (If it has, let me know - like you, I’m open to being wrong here.) Anyway, Framber has been a starter in 2 postseason runs; the results were very good in 2019 and very bad in 2021. I think you have to assume the difference is small sample size noise, right?

Ha, could have been. Danielson said something that was hilariously hyperbolic in that vein.

That’s spot on. Though Jeteration was not as egregious as Tebowation. Gary Daniels actually said something to the effect of “you become a better person just by being in Tebow’s presence” and called him “the best running QB in the history of college football” two years after VY went pro. Tebow is/was the single most overrated athlete of my lifetime and I’m not sure there is a close second.

Well that contract the Padres gave him sure keeps looking shittier and shittier for them. Jesus. Maybe Preller is the biggest dipshit.

Bro, I like you but this is getting…weird. This isn’t hyperbolic at all. Over the last 2 seasons it’s Realmuto and Smith at the top of the list. Turner’s free agency will be interesting. Remaining in LA seems to make the most sense…but like you said, Smith will also need to get paid soon, they’re already paying Betts and Freeman, etc…I know the dodgers can afford it, but do they want to continue to pay waaaaay over the luxury tax threshold, when they’ve proven adept at drafting/developing really good, inexpensive players?

It’s why the Astros didn’t make huge efforts to sign him. He’d had an injury history, and it didn’t figure to get better as he gets older. It sucked to lose him, because we all loved Springer, but it was probably the right decision by the Astros. In 2 seasons in TOR, he hasn’t been dependable.

Y’all know they have Soto for the next two years in addition to the rest of this year, right? That may well end up being a bad trade for them, but let’s not pretend that we already know that after a week.

Yeah I watched some of that game; plate ump was atrocious.

Anything we get from LM this year is bonus; he shouldn’t be counted on for anything.

Guess it depends on what you mean by “good for the game.” It’s great for the owners. More teams have a chance to play in the postseason, which increases interest for a few more fan bases. Also, they are less incentivized to try to build great teams (and thus can get away with lower payrolls) since you get to the playoffs for being just pretty good. On the flip side, the more teams that get into the playoffs, the less likely it is that the actual best teams - proven over 162 games, not 7 - play in the WS.

Do you understand why Dave Winfield is in the HOF and not Barry Bonds?

Is there evidence that postseason pitching (in the wild card era) is actually better than regular season pitching, over a large enough sample? Genuine question - I don’t think I’ve seen any data on this. I understand the hypothesis, but don’t know how/if it has been studied. Anyway, Jeter played in 158 postseason games in his career - so, a full season’s worth. I would suspect that over 700+ postseason PAs, he faced a few great pitchers, some good pitchers, and many average-ish pitchers, etc. Given that we have a large sample there and a large sample for his career performance, and the results are nearly identical, then the most reasonable conclusion is that the quality of pitching he faced over each sample is basically the same.

I thought it was solid. The last sentence made it.

If they continue at this pace and go, say, 25-30 the rest of the way, they’ll be at 95 wins. It would take an absolutely shocking collapse for them to miss the playoffs.

Again, the guy has a 113 wRC+ in the equivalent of a full season of PAs at the MLB level. He’s above 100 against lefties and righties. I agree, he should be playing most days at this point.

Yeah, any 7-game series between good teams is going to be essentially a coin flip. The team with the better roster loses nearly half the time, because having a marginally better roster doesn’t mean much in a small handful of games. And it’s usually not due to managerial decisions. As much as Dusty drives me nuts with his lineups, that’s not why the team lost to ATL last year. And we can talk all day long about Hinch pulling Greinke in G7, but the truth is that Harris’s pitch that Kendrick poked down the RF line was a good pitch; Kendrick hit something like .130 on low/outside pitches that entire season. That he so improbably hit that pitch for a HR doesn’t mean that Hinch cost the Astros that game. It was bad luck.

Mostly agree. He was both somewhat overrated and also a great player. Overrated in the sense that he wasn’t a particularly good defensive SS (but won a bunch of gold gloves) and had the incessant “postseason hero” narrative on a hugely successful NY team (he was the exact same hitter in the postseason as he was in the regular season, he didn’t have some “magic” that made him better in the postseason). But, that doesn’t change the fact that he was a very good player and was remarkably consistent for a very long time, a clear HOFer.

Agree with the premise, but not sure that I agree with the notion that the Astros have that much surplus at SP, particularly after moving Odorizzi. McCullers may be back in ‘22, but how good will he be? How much work load will he be able to handle? Seems like a question mark to me.

Pretty much describes me as well. The transfers, the player payments, the conference shifting, etc…it’s all good for the players, and I’m glad for them, but it makes the sport far less interesting to me. It doesn’t help that I’m getting older and that Texas has not only sucked for a decade, but been excruciatingly aggravating and boring too, but the money has kind of ruined the sport in a lot of ways. Not saying anyone should see it the same way, just my view.

CSB: my father in law is a physician who practiced in Houston for almost his entire career. Some of his patients included guys in the Astros front office. One day, sometime in the 80s when the Dodgers were in town, one of his Astros patients asked if he could see Vin, who had some flu/cold symptoms. So there he was, in an exam room, as Scully was telling him his list of symptoms, in that iconic voice, and my FiL was having trouble concentrating because he just kept thinking about how surreal the whole thing was. RIP VS, that voice is synonymous with baseball.