Guadaloopy

IT'S FUCKING APRIL 11th!

The Baseball Forum is less without him. I'll have to start paying attention to Jose Ramirez on my own now. Thank God we still have Gil Bang to monitor Shohei for us.

I say it at some point every year, and I will say it again this year. The internet sports doom prophet is the easiest space to occupy online. If the team outperforms your predictions of the sky falling, you get to be "pleasantly surprised." But if things do go down the shitter, you get to say "I told you so!" It's a nutless, soulless position that I have zero respect for. By tying our allegiance to a particular team, we have all agreed to allow ourselves to be emotionally manipulated by the outcome of a child's game. That's part of the allure of sports. It is beyond me why someone would start that journey from a place of negativity. The beauty of rooting for a sports team is the anticipation that something good is about to happen. A negative outlook from the outset breaks the equation and sucks the joy out of being a fan. Why even do it?

I'm generally on board with the "team will be fine" sentiment, but they are using up a lot of runway early in the season. April was a tough month on paper before the season started. Combine that with the glacial start for several players, and things look way worse than they really are.

Your April proclamations always hold up well. Keep at it.

Sig Mejdal was a huge loss.

And he would sit you down in three pitches. COVID impacted a LOT of young careers, so I cut a lot of slack for these guys. My nephew was drafted in the 5th round by the Dodgers in 2017. He was already behind the 8-ball because he went on a 2-yr mission after high school and missed two years of development in competitive ball. He did fine at the Rookie level in the partial 2017 season. He flat out sucked and was injured at the A-level and went back to Rookie ball in 2018. He turned it around in 2019 with the best SO/9 and BB/9 of his career and was excited for the next season. Then COVID hit in 2020 and it all went poof. He was already old for the level he was at, so missing a year erased any minute chance he might have had left. The Dodgers released him in the great cull. COVID was like a Thanos snap for the minors. By the time things got started back up in 2021, 25% of MiLB teams just disappeared in the reorg. So I have a lot of respect for the guys who survived that and navigated through the wreckage to keep their careers going.

Astros waltz to a win if Bregs doesn’t give up on a catchable foul ball.

WTF, Espada?

What a shit inning.

Kind of a horseshit challenge. Definitely beyond the time frame for a challenge.

Bregs…

All three runs on Bregs that inning.

And now you know... the rest of the Story.

We viewed from an elephant sanctuary in Hugo, OK. For the 2.5 hours before the eclipse, we had pretty heavy cloud cover. But no shit, not ten minutes before totality, we started to see tiny breaks in the clouds and caught glimpses of the eclipse in progress. Less than a minute before totality, an opening came in the clouds that lasted for the entire totality! What was really cool is that during the totality, the elephants started trumpeting. A surreal experience!

Ok. I’m back in. Rest of the season starts today!

Are you kidding? In these dark days, he was our lone beacon of hope.

Yeah, that’s an error. Whine more, Angels.

This is usually me, but there is usually some bad luck or a key injury to help me look forward to brighter days. Outside of the two wins, we have seen a LOT of bad baseball. Bad approaches at the plate. Badly located pitches. Bad base-running. Starting pitching has been the one slightly bright spot, and even that has faltered a couple of times. Bregs looks horrible. J. Abreu looks even worse so far than he did while purportedly injured last year. Altuve is hitting, but his TOOTBLANing is worse. Despite some decent results, Yordan has been missing a lot of meaty pitches. I can’t even begin to talk about the bullpen. Of course it can all turn around, but I’m seeing more worrisome signs than bright spots for now. I’ll always root for this team and hold out hope, but my confidence in them is fading rapidly.

Altuve’s gonna keep running those bases like a madman, until there’s a free run on the table. That’s when you stop. It’s not worth it unless there’s a degree of difficulty attached. I am not as confident as I was three days ago.

See, we even chose not to take that free third run. We are confident that two is the right number for us. You just wait.

Good opportunity to get Singleton more ABs. Always a good call, Joe.

One of these days we will hold you fucks to one run and our two runs will reign supreme. Who’ll be laughing then, huh?