Jump to content

2021-22 MLB Offseason Thread

Beau Vine

By Beau Vine
in Baseball

 Share

Recommended Posts

Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19249

Posted
Posted
16 minutes ago, huge said:

Now this is interesting...maybe

https://www.nj.com/yankees/2022/03/appeals-court-rules-letter-that-allegedly-shows-mlb-hid-yankees-sign-stealing-should-be-unsealed.html

 

Yes please. 
I’m sure this will get a 24 hour news cycle and then go away, while Twins fans root for correa, Blue Jays fans root for Springer and everyone savages Altuve for the rest of his career when he wasn’t even involved by admission of all Astros players (who copped to it themselves) as well as audio evidence. 

  • Hook 'Em 3
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Replies 842
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

Scraps
Scraps

This will make me rage more than the dumbass beer league softball rules they had

shadow_operative2.0
shadow_operative2.0

You stupid mother fucker, you just proved my point. Thank you, idiot. 

TonyTexas
TonyTexas

Posted Images

HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 8967

Posted
Posted

OK, dumb question amnesty time: is the regular season schedule now set? Have they rescheduled the first two weeks of games? I ask because my son and I are planning a summer trip. It's down to either Boston, Chicago, or DC. The tiebreaker will be if we can catch a game while we're there. The Red Sox and Cubs are both at home the week we're looking to travel. I didn't know if there is going to be any other schedule changes though. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Scraps

Scraps 13598

Posted
Posted
13 minutes ago, HornOnTheBayou said:

OK, dumb question amnesty time: is the regular season schedule now set? Have they rescheduled the first two weeks of games? I ask because my son and I are planning a summer trip. It's down to either Boston, Chicago, or DC. The tiebreaker will be if we can catch a game while we're there. The Red Sox and Cubs are both at home the week we're looking to travel. I didn't know if there is going to be any other schedule changes though. 

Should be set...first series is being added to end of season for everyone and the 2nd series is being sprinkled in throughout with possible doubleheaders, or dumbass shit like playing as the home team in the away stadium for at least one team.  

But even if it isn't reflected on the schedule the other 156 games are not changed.  Those will not be moving days regardless so you can schedule your trip 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 8967

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, Scraps said:

Should be set...first series is being added to end of season for everyone and the 2nd series is being sprinkled in throughout with possible doubleheaders, or dumbass shit like playing as the home team in the away stadium for at least one team.  

But even if it isn't reflected on the schedule the other 156 games are not changed.  Those will not be moving days regardless so you can schedule your trip 

That's what I figured, but I just wanted to double check. Thanks! 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Blotto

Blotto 23705

Posted
Posted

I noticed Boston signed Trevor Story to a 6 year/$140 million dollar contract and he plans on playing 2B since Xander B. is the short stop. Here's Story's career split for home/away

image.thumb.png.7a93ee7131e91be9f2974564b8ce6a2d.png

The story I read quoted him as saying

Quote

"There's kind of that stigma around Coors Field, that the ball flies, which it certainly does," Story said. "I think baseball's baseball and it's played the same in every park."

He may believe that, but in every other park he's a .241 hitter with a significantly lower power stats. Granted, Fenway is a hitter friendly park as well. Just seems like an odd signing when Boston already has Bogaerts at SS, unless they dont plan on him being around too long. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19249

Posted
Posted
21 hours ago, Blotto said:

I noticed Boston signed Trevor Story to a 6 year/$140 million dollar contract and he plans on playing 2B since Xander B. is the short stop. Here's Story's career split for home/away

image.thumb.png.7a93ee7131e91be9f2974564b8ce6a2d.png

The story I read quoted him as saying

He may believe that, but in every other park he's a .241 hitter with a significantly lower power stats. Granted, Fenway is a hitter friendly park as well. Just seems like an odd signing when Boston already has Bogaerts at SS, unless they dont plan on him being around too long. 

So there is a pretty interesting article/study from a couple years ago that says, essentially, although we should obviously not believe the Coors field stats for guys up there we should also believe that their road performance is worse than "playing every game at sea level".  Essentially, they get trained/groomed to see a ball break 6 inches at altitude that breaks 12 elsewhere and it fucks up their pitch recognition for the entire year.  Also, there is the thing about living at altitude and then recovery time being longer, and getting more worn down that could be a possibility.  

I'm glad my team didn't do the Story deal b/c that seems a thin read to hold onto in my opinion, but for those who might be hopeful there you are. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
shadow_operative2.0

shadow_operative2.0 16060

Posted
Posted

Monster. 

Quote

The Blue Jays and Rockies have agreed to a trade sending outfielder Randal Grichuk from Toronto to Colorado in exchange for outfielder Raimel Tapia. The Jays will acquire infield prospect Adrian Pinto from the Rockies, and they’ll send cash to Colorado to help cover Grichuk’s contract.

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/03/blue-jays-trade-randal-grichuk-rockies-raimel-tapia.html

 

And Pham to Cincy last night. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54878

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Damn allergies...

Quote

PARK HILLS, Mo. — It was nearly freezing when Dan Bryan pulled into the parking lot at West County High School, and a sheet of ice still caked the baseball field behind the school, but he had made a promise, so he grabbed his son’s baseball glove and prepared to play another game of catch. Dressed in a grey hoodie and cap, Dan greeted John Simily, a local high school coach, then stepped onto the slushy field, where he pulled out a ball and started to loosen his arm.

It was a Saturday morning in February, and this was already the 59th time Dan had played this year. If you ask him why he’s here, he’ll offer different answers: Maybe it’s therapy. Maybe it’s the human connection we crave. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to forget his son. There’s no perfect way to explain it, he says, but on New Year’s Eve, he made a resolution: It had been one year and 107 days since his youngest son Ethan, 16, was killed in a car accident on his way home from high school baseball practice. To remember him, Dan made a pledge to play catch 365 times in 2022 — one connection for each day on the calendar, one baseball memory for every day of the year.

He started on New Year’s Day, playing catch with Ethan’s best friend Tycen, who had been a passenger in the car. He headed out again the next day—this time with his pastor. On day three, he shared a catch with another local father who’d lost a child.

As the world moved on, and Major League Baseball remained at a standstill, Dan, 46, kept heading out to play catch, asking strangers, reconnecting with friends, sharing stories about Ethan, who, on the day of the accident, was a sophomore infielder coming into his own.

“I’ll never forget him,” Dan said. “But I’ll never have new memories. And I don’t want to lose old memories. I don’t want to feel like I’m ever in a position where I’ve forgotten an important memory.

As the mitts started to pop on the field at West County, as the catch found a rhythm, Dan considered his idea: Maybe if he does the one thing Ethan loved the most, he’ll remember another piece of him. Maybe if he shares the grief of losing a child, he’ll come to understand it. Maybe, he says, there is something about the very act of playing catch: “People open up,” he says.

As he tossed a baseball to Simily, he began to tell a story, pointing up to a light pole up near the school, where on Sept. 16, 2020, he watched Ethan’s last high baseball practice. He’d left his office job at 4:40 p.m., looked at the clock on his dash, and realized he had time to swing by the high school to watch the final minutes of practice. He showed up just in time to see his son step to the plate during an intrasquad scrimmage, so he posted up outside and watched Ethan, a left-handed hitter, pull a pitch deep into the right-center gap, one-hopping the fence and driving in two runs.

Moments later, practice ended. The coach called in the players. Ethan jogged toward home plate and waved up at his dad, which Dan noticed right away. Ethan was a rule follower, sensitive and conscientious, usually all business at practice. He never acknowledged his dad like that. But when Dan saw the smile on Ethan’s face, he realized his son was just lost in the moment. “He was so carefree,” Dan said.

Dan got back in the car and drove home. Ethan stayed around to throw a bullpen and help some younger players. Dan was already home and making dinner when the phone rang.

In the days after the accident, Dan couldn’t get out of bed. He slept for hours, except when he couldn’t. He felt exhausted all the time. Everything after Ethan’s mother first called was a blur. He rushed to the scene, where he witnessed a first responder place a sheet over Ethan’s body. He broke down in tears. He started screaming as a police officer tried to keep him away.

That night, everyone gathered at the field. There were still 200 people there when Dan showed up at 9 p.m. He stood near the front and spoke, but he can’t remember a word. The candlelight vigil was two nights later. The funeral service Sunday. Five hundred people filled seats on the baseball field at West County High School.

The next week, Dan crawled back into bed. He didn’t want to see anybody, which left his fiancé Jennifer worried. “Every time he woke up,” she said, “he just wanted to go back to sleep.” Years ago, he might have turned to alcohol. He avoided that impulse, which made him proud, but he didn’t know how to cope. He’d never been one to open up. He’d grown up here in rural Missouri, played football and sang choir in high school, drove an Army Humvee in Bosnia, then taken a job at the Missouri Department of Corrections after finishing college. He was a thoughtful employee who later became the city administrator of Desloge, a town of 5,000 an hour south of St. Louis. But he rarely let others in. “I was a very closed-off person,” he said.

When Jennifer suggested heeding a doctor’s prescription for antidepressants, he reluctantly agreed. When family suggested returning to church, they found community and support. But when others suggested therapy, he was hesitant. Who could understand what he was going through?

“I didn’t want to show up to an office somewhere and talk to someone that was educated on how to talk to me but can’t really feel what I’m feeling,” Dan said.

Nobody, he figured, could understand what he’d lost, how his son could charm adults with his smile and his polite demeanor, how he bridged the social divides of high school by singing in the choir, how when Dan signed up Ethan for hitting lessons with Derek Gibson — a former Cardinals minor-leaguer who lived nearby — it was Gibson who looked forward to the session each week. “I knew I was going to have a good day, because Ethan Bryan was coming to hit,” Gibson said. “He was the perfect kid.”

Nobody could understand how Ethan had wanted to go to West County because it had fall and spring baseball, how he was just starting to find himself on the field, how a growth spurt had thinned out some adolescent baby fat, how Gibson had just unlocked his power stroke, polishing his load and timing, how he seemed so locked in during the fall of his sophomore year.

Nobody could understand, but Dan realized he needed to talk to someone, so one day he called an old friend named Al Whitehead, a former co-worker and psychologist from the department of corrections. “Hi Doc, it’s Dan,” Whitehead recalled Dan saying. “My son died.”

They started by meeting once a week. Dan would share his grief. Whitehead would offer tools, such as journaling and an emotional freedom technique called “tapping.” Dan started to put his pain on paper. He kept returning to church. He found little victories in daily life, in a Sunday service or a dinner out. He poured his heart into honoring his son, dedicating a stretch of highway, a golf tournament and a scholarship started by Dan and Ethan’s mother Jaclyn. But when baseball season returned in the spring, he realized there was one place he couldn’t go: The ball field.

The games were the worst. He’d show up for a bit, collect his thoughts, watch for an inning or two, and then he’d have to leave.

“Every time I’d see the guys jog out onto the field, I’m looking to see where E is at,” he said. “I’d scan every face and none of them are Ethan’s face.”

The pain lasted through the fall season. Then one day in December, Dan remembered a book he had sitting in his house.

The idea to play catch actually arrived in the fall of 2020, when Dan was still in a fog. One morning, in the days after Ethan’s accident, a local Missouri musician and author named Ethan D. Bryan was sitting in a coffee shop in Springfield, Mo., Googling his name while looking for book reviews. Bryan, 47, had just published a book titled, “A Year of Playing Catch: What a Simple Daily Experiment Taught Me About Life.” As he combed the internet for feedback, he stumbled upon an obituary for a teenager who shared his name.

For the next 10 minutes, he began to read about Ethan, how he loved baseball, singing and Marvel movies, how he left behind one older brother and a team of friends at West County High School. Awed by the coincidence and feeling the urge to do something, Bryan emailed a high school administrator, then sent along copy of his book with an accompanying note of sympathy, which is how it came to sit on Dan Bryan’s shelf for the next year, until one day in December he started thumbing through it.

There was something about the concept that touched him, Dan says, the idea of ritual and communal grieving, a daily journal of baseball. He phoned Bryan, the author, to offer thanks. Then he set about planning. “I just determined that I was going to use that leather ball and the red seams and I was going to use that as a form of therapy,” he said.

So Dan started to play catch. He enlisted former teachers and coaches. He posted invitations on Facebook. “I hope,” he wrote, “to meet and toss the baseball with those I currently know and future friends I have not yet met.” He pulled out Ethan’s glove and a baseball that was collected from the car. He gave his project a name: “Baseball Seams to Heal.”

If you play catch with Dan, you will hear stories of Ethan, how he loved to listen to Lewis Capaldi and Sam Smith, how he modeled his left-handed approach after the Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter, how he was the rare high school athlete who enjoyed performing Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing on My Own.” Dan found the stories to be cathartic. What he did not expect was how playing catch would make him feel. “I’m not afraid to show my emotion now,” he said. “I’ve become vulnerable.”

The American poet Donald Hall once wrote that “baseball is fathers and sons playing catch,” but the benefits of the act may transcend that definition. Research has found that Parkinson’s patients can benefit from playing catch with both a real and virtual ball. Other studies have shown that playing catch can improve mood and mental health. John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, once compared the act of playing catch to a “deep, cosmic joy.” It takes you back in time, to a baseball practice with friends, to a game of catch with a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, to a moment where you shared something and trusted it would return.

“There’s something about the physical act of playing catch,” said Ethan D. Bryan, the author. “The gatekeeper in your brain that usually prevents you from sharing intimate details relaxes. You establish trust.”

After Bryan published his book in 2020, he maintained his habit of playing catch. Last year he joined another catch evangelist, Rhett Grametbauer, at the Play Catch Movement, a non-profit focused on promoting the benefits of the act. On June 19, they will spearhead the first-ever National Play Catch Week, which will launch on Father’s Day and coincide with a Guinness World Record Attempt in Council Bluffs, Iowa, during the College World Series.

By chance, it will also coincide with Ethan Bryan’s birthday. He would have been 18 years old on June 24. He would have been a senior this fall. On most days, Dan thinks about what baseball meant to his son’s life. He thinks about the seasons he will miss, the memories he won’t have, the moments like the one from his last practice, when Ethan saw a pitch he liked and one-hopped it off the wall. Back at West County High School, the snow was still covering the field on a cold Saturday morning in February, and Dan asked me to join in for a game of catch. He tossed a baseball my way. My old Wilson glove from high school popped. In a moment I tossed it back, and Dan started in on another story.

“In the beginning,” he said, “I just wanted to spread the word, let people know who Ethan was, for those that didn’t get to meet him, and keeping his memory alive with me. It’s become a lot more than a game of catch.”

 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guadaloopy

Guadaloopy 11039

Posted
Posted
18 hours ago, Don Johnson said:

I get the base salary, but not the incentives.  Hell, I'd give him $20 million if he was MVP and $10 million for finishing 2-10.  And much, much more on the others.  Would be worth every penny.  

 

I’m sure the Cardinals were like “Sure, Al, we’ll put some incentives in for you *snort*”.  They could have safely added two zeroes to every one of those numbers.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19249

Posted
Posted
20 hours ago, Don Johnson said:

I get the base salary, but not the incentives.  Hell, I'd give him $20 million if he was MVP and $10 million for finishing 2-10.  And much, much more on the others.  Would be worth every penny.  

 

Yes- other than the gold glove part you could absolutely add two zeros to every incentive and it would still be a bargain of a contract.  Also, he has no chance at any of those incentives except maybe the playoff MVP stuff.  He could hit 2 HR's in a 3 game division series sweep and be named NLDS MVP I suppose.  Not likely, but not completely improbable.  

  • Hook 'Em 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
huge

huge 3799

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, Hank Chinaski said:

I mean, I still think he’ll be a good player again, and I know he’s had injuries, but his drop off since the MVP year has been bizarre.

Maybe it’s all injury related, I don’t know. 

 

5 minutes ago, Hank Chinaski said:

I mean, I still think he’ll be a good player again, and I know he’s had injuries, but his drop off since the MVP year has been bizarre.

Maybe it’s all injury related, I don’t know. 

maybe he has malaria

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Helobious

Helobious 9504

Posted
Posted
On 3/26/2022 at 3:42 PM, Sbbruin said:

If true WOW. Helobiius needs a cleanup towel
 

 

On 3/26/2022 at 3:56 PM, TonyTexas said:

It’s funny that you actually think that might be true. The longest Statcast measured home run ever is 505 ft. 

 

On 3/26/2022 at 4:08 PM, Wulaw Horn said:

I imagine it hit on the ground and kept rolling and they measured from there? 

You all got Porch’d. 
 

 

  • Haha 1
  • Rage+1 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Sbbruin

Sbbruin 21912

Posted
Posted
16 hours ago, Hank Chinaski said:

I mean, I still think he’ll be a good player again, and I know he’s had injuries, but his drop off since the MVP year has been bizarre.

Maybe it’s all injury related, I don’t know. 

It is bizarre, and I’m convinced it’s all mental.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...