Jump to content

2018 MLB Thread

Netzer

By Netzer
in Baseball

 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 4.1k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

Player
Player

If only statcast had the technology to measure the launch angle and exit velocity of yankee balls that have been hit off of your chin.

Goo Punch
Goo Punch
Hank Chinaski
Hank Chinaski

Good fucking riddance. 

WBT

WBT 20972

Posted
Posted
47 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

That was quick.  Last year everyone was talking about how great he was after getting the Twins to the WC. Now he’s unemployed. 

They wanted to fire him after last year but then he went and made the playoffs

Link to comment
Share on other sites
spystud13

spystud13 2371

Posted
Posted

This guy makes a lot of solid decisions. 

Quote

Minnesota Twins infielder Miguel Sano has been arrested in the Dominican Republic, according to a tweet from Santo Domingo News. Sano reportedly ran over a police officer after being told to pull over, then left the scene. The officer is reportedly in the hospital with a broken leg.

Sano had off-the-field issues at the end of last year when he was accused of sexual assault by a photographer. MLB investigated the issue and ultimately levied no punishment.

The 25 year old Sano had a bad 2018 campaign on the field, missing time due to injuries and at one point getting demoted to the minors. He ended the year with a -0.5 bWAR.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Beau Vine

Beau Vine 55863

Posted
Posted

You think that big stupid fuck has the money to pay off la policia and get out of jail?

Even if he does, MLB is going to put a big suspension on him after they let him off the hook on that attempted sexual assault thing.

 

Oops, and he's arb eligible after his big 82 OPS+, -0.5 WAR season.  

  • Fuck You 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
APMP

APMP 688

Posted
Posted

This DOJ investigation into MLB, especially the Dodgers, is getting interesting. They really produced a slide deck rating the activities of five of their Latin America operations employees as "Criminal?"

 

Where's Stringer Bell when you need him to stop idiots from taking notes on a criminal fuckin conspiracy?

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
spystud13

spystud13 2371

Posted
Posted
Quote

The Cubs made an attempt to lock up Kris Bryant to a multiyear deal in the neighborhood of $200 million, but the superstar third baseman turned down the deal in recent months, a source confirmed to MLB.com on Wednesday. ESPN's Dave Kaplan was the first to report the offer and its rejection. The club has not confirmed such an offer.

Bryant and agent Scott Boras are inclined to proceed on a year-by-year salary increase through arbitration before Bryant becomes a free agent after the 2021 season. Bryant earned a record $10.85 million in 2018, the highest salary a player has earned in his first year of arbitration.

Should Bryant plan to wait out his final four years of club control and hit the free-agent market available to all suitors, the Cubs could face a quandary of losing Bryant for nothing. In that context, Bryant might be a valuable trade commodity as former National League MVP Award winner who is under club control for three more seasons. Bryant, when healthy, is revered as one of the game's best hitters, but he was limited to 102 games last year with nagging left shoulder and left wrist injuries, and he hit .272/.374/.460 -- all below his career average marks -- with 13 homers.

After an abrupt and disappointing end to their 95-win season, in which the Cubs lost in Game 163 to the Brewers to determine the NL Central champion and the NL Wild Card Game to the Rockies at Wrigley Field, the Cubs are entering an offseason in territory they haven't been accustomed to after three straight NL Championship Series appearances. And manager Joe Maddon's status was questioned last Wednesday in a report from MLB Network insider Ken Rosenthal for The Athletic, though the team said later that afternoon that Maddon would return for 2019.

Bryant's free agency is still years away, and along with Bryant, outfielder Kyle Schwarber, infielder Javier Baez and first baseman Anthony Rizzo will all be eligible for free agency after 2021, leaving most of their young positional nucleus that won the '16 World Series intact.

 

Ballsy. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 53466

Posted
Posted
18 hours ago, spystud13 said:

Yep, saying no to $200+M has to be one hell of a thing. 

Probably easier when you just made 11 million and will make that much or more the next 3 years barring catastrophic injury. 

But yeah, in terms of lifestyle and generational family wealth, what’s the difference between 200 million and whatever number he’s looking for?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
shnsajax

shnsajax 3607

Posted
Posted
20 hours ago, spystud13 said:

Yep, saying no to $200+M has to be one hell of a thing. 

 I am guessing that Boras wants Harper and Machado to sign first to dictate the market prior to Bryant even considering this. Not to mention the Cubs could be in for either one as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
DanRydell

DanRydell 799

Posted
Posted
53 minutes ago, spystud13 said:

But he’d still have $200M. Say he has to have significant rotator cuff surgery or some shit in a couple years, that $200M would sound real good. 

Sure. There's certainly a risk. But there's far more upside to go with that risk if it was 10 years for $200M versus 6 years for $200M.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
WBT

WBT 20972

Posted
Posted
45 minutes ago, spystud13 said:

Only player in history to play for all 4 LCS teams? Bunch of hints here if you want them. 

https://www.mlb.com/cut4/the-one-player-who-played-for-every-championship-series-team/c-297618402

 

Got it after the first two clues, should have thought of it without any but the name didn't come to mind

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 53466

Posted
Posted

Wonder if 5/140 would sound better to him or something similar that avoids more arb and buys his first 2 fa years, but ends early enough for him to get another deal. Or an opt out.  Who knows what boras is thinking, other than the waiting on manny and Harper deals. 

I cant imagine the cba changing that much for the next deal. If it does, it would be following a prolonged work stoppage. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
shnsajax

shnsajax 3607

Posted
Posted
But he’d still have $200M. Say he has to have significant rotator cuff surgery or some shit in a couple years, that $200M would sound real good. 


Its not to say he won’t sign an extension in January or February. With the Cubs working on developing their own network that valuation goes up a lot when you include Bryant and one of the two FA’s long term.
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Fudge Nuggets

Fudge Nuggets 19453

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, DanRydell said:

It’s hard to really evaluate without knowing how many years the $200m would be for. The problem for Bryant with signing any extension is it pushes his free agency into his mid-30s and recent trends indicate he’s not going to get heavily paid at that point.

$200MM is heavily paid.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Beau Vine

Beau Vine 55863

Posted
Posted

Sorry if all of this doesn't paste, but this is why you should subscribe to theathletic.com:

Quote

 

There’s video evidence that Luis Severino was tipping his pitches in the playoffs — and well before then

GettyImages-1051854612-1024x732.jpg
By Ben Harris 1h ago comment-icon@2x.png28 save-icon@2x.png

The reports started trickling out. First from Red Sox radio broadcaster Lou Merloni on Tuesday, the day after the 16-1 laugher that put the Yankees’ season on the brink. Then again on Thursday from Fancred’s Jon Heyman, the day after the Yankees were eliminated from the postseason.​>

In Friday’s end of the season press conference, Aaron Boone admitted that he also believed Luis Severino was tipping his pitches at points in the second half of the season.

“I think it has happened at times,” Boone said Friday. “I think he’s done a good job of correcting it, but I think it would pop up from time to time. And it’s something that we will address even more so this winter in trying to eliminate any chance of that happening.”

Is this the reason why — among over 50 pitchers who were qualified in the first half and threw 60 innings in the second half — Severino’s drop in ERA from 2.31 in the first half to 5.37 in the second half was the biggest in baseball by a whole half of a run?

Either way, that “good enough job correcting it” wasn’t good enough, and it returned down the stretch in the most important games of the season.

We now have good evidence to back up these reports, especially in Severino’s Game 3 ALCS outing, where he allowed six earned runs and seven hits in three innings of work. 

Because it’s the playoffs, there is just one broadcast of each game instead of separate home and away feeds. This limits what we can prove based on video footage. But going to the tape, there’s reasonable suggestion that Severino was indeed tipping his pitches in certain situations.

Our first hint, even before Merloni’s comment or Heyman’s reporting, came when the TBS camera crew caught Jackie Bradley Jr. in the dugout Monday night during the second inning seemingly whispering “fastball…fastball” behind a closed fist to Mookie Betts, right before a 98-mph Luis Severino fastball to Brock Holt.

Bradley.gif

The camera focuses on Bradley and Betts in the dugout, then cuts back to Severino before the pitch is thrown. The timing here is important. Notice that, after watching intently, Bradley seems to mouth “fastball” just a few seconds before Severino releases the pitch.

This is our first hint.

The alleged tipping occurs before the pitch, not during it. Meaning, for example, it’s not about his release point. This gave Bradley enough time to predict the pitch before the camera flipped back to Severino, who was finishing his leg kick and readying himself to stride toward home.

Our second hint is the situation. Severino is working out of the stretch with only a man on second.

In this at-bat to Holt, Severino throws four fastballs and one changeup. The pre-pitch routines for three of the four fastballs are shown in full on the broadcast. (On the one that is not shown, the camera is settled on Bradley predicting the pitch in the dugout, as seen above.)

On all three fastballs for which we can watch the entire pre-pitch setup, Severino checks the runner on second, then he looks off toward third base as if resting for a moment, then turns his head the rest of the way toward the batter and fires home. That hesitation before turning fully toward home is his tell. Here are the three fastballs in Holt’s at-bat. Notice how Severino always looks to third base. (There is no runner on third base in this situation, but because his body is facing third from the stretch, it is a natural resting point.)

When he throws his changeup, the lone offspeed pitch in the at-bat, he checks the runner at second then whips his head all the way around to home plate in one motion and throws. He never pauses to look toward third.

And just for good measure, here is every slider Severino threw with the lead runner on second in both of his 2018 playoff starts. He never once stops to look toward third, instead turning his head from second to home all at once.

To test out our theory, let’s sync up the clip of Bradley prognosticating in the dugout with the fastball one pitch before it to see if the general time of his prediction matches when Severino tends to look toward third. Although we can’t be sure of the exact timing of Severino’s windup when the TV broadcast was focused on Bradley, if the two match, it’s a fair bet that we’re onto something here.

It’s a dead ringer. Bradley says “Fastball” at the exact same time Severino looks toward third base.

With the lead runner on second, Severino fell into a pattern. If he was throwing a fastball, he would check the runner on second, then look toward third base before turning and throwing home. On non-fastballs, he would check the runner at second then turn his head 180 degrees and begin his motion home.

It’s important to note that when Bradley Jr. appeared to forecast Severino’s 0-2 fastball to Holt before the pitch was even thrown, that was the first time Severino faced a lead runner on second in the game. Again, that is the only situation when Severino has to worry about checking a runner on second, hence impacting his routine to throw home. Because this instance came on the third pitch of the at-bat, and the first two prior pitches were both fastballs, this piece of intel regarding Severino’s tendencies must have come from their advance scouting. They had no offspeed pitches that evening to compare with. They only saw Severino throw two fastballs with a lead runner on second before Bradley’s correct fastball prediction. As the game went on, the trend held.

In the third inning, Severino faced Xander Bogaerts with a runner on second. After checking on the runner, Severino looked toward third base before throwing each of the four pitches. Every one was a fastball.  Bogaerts singled on the last of the four.

In the fourth inning, Bradley came to bat in his first post-prediction at-bat. Batting ninth with runners on first and second and nobody out, Bradley was ordered to bunt.

Severino checked the runner on second, then flipped his head toward home and threw — his tell-tale sign for an offspeed pitch, because he didn’t stop to look toward third. On what would be a perfect-looking pitch to bunt, a ball that started right down the middle but dove down below the zone, Bradley calmly laid off to move ahead 1-0. Then Bradley took a fastball way down and in, which Severino telegraphed by pausing to look toward third before the pitch. Then a changeup up and away ran the count to 3-0, another pitch Severino hinted at by staying consistent and going straight from looking at second to looking at home.

Then, on the next pitch, Severino broke his trend. Without pausing to look toward third base, he fired a fastball way inside for ball four, a pitch that was supposed to be down and away. It’s fair to wonder whether breaking his tendency caused such erratic command on the pitch. That would be the only time among his 13 pitches with a lead runner on second in Game 3 that Severino broke from this routine, and it resulted in a walk.

If we look back at Severino’s last five starts, including Game 3 and the Wild Card game, and isolate these specific instances with a lead runner on second, Severino’s patterns solidify. Using our methodology — if he pauses to look toward third it’s a fastball, if he doesn’t it’s an offspeed pitch — we can correctly predict 89 percent of the pitches (39 of 44) that Severino threw before the ball was even released. None of those five pitches in which he strayed from his routine resulted in strikes. One hit a batter. When he deviated from his predictable groove, bad things happened.

Now, it’s not as if Severino pitched the entire game with a lead runner on second. He faced just three batters in Game 3 in this scenario: Holt in the second inning, Bogaerts in the third and Bradley in the fourth. But each of those at-bats contributed to runs scoring for Boston.

Holt moved Rafael Devers to third, and Devers scored one batter later on Christian Vasquez’s infield single off Severino’s glove. Benintendi moved to third on Bogaerts’ single in the third, before scoring on a force out on the very next pitch. And in the fourth, Bradley walked to load the bases and force Severino from the game. He would later score on a bases-clearing double by Benintendi that gave the Red Sox a commanding 7-0 lead.

There was another, more minute tell that an astute Red Sox team may have picked up on, one much less obvious than Severino’s pre-programmed methods of checking runners and delivering his pitches.

When set from the stretch, Severino held his glove a bit higher up on his body when throwing fastballs than when he threw anything offspeed. The graphic below overlays snapshots of five fastballs and five offspeed pitches Severino threw in Game 3. The red line shows where the top of his glove usually sat in relation to his body before he threw a fastball. The blue line shows where it rested before he threw an offspeed pitch.

Screen-Shot-2018-10-12-at-3.57.23-AM.png

This varied a bit from pitch to pitch, but there is still a slight trend. In combination with the other tendencies the Red Sox gleaned, this may have served as reinforcement, or a guiding principle, in the case that Severino wasn’t bothered with checking a runner on second.

The Yankees will have all offseason to stew about a 100-win season gone for naught, a reminder of baseball’s fickle playoff system. Severino will have something else to remind himself of come next season.

Always tip your waiter. Never tip your pitches.

 

  • Like 1
  • Fuck You 1
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...