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Posted
They said on the radio Peacock's issue turned out to be a nerve problem and not his shoulder.  I hadn't heard that before today though I might have missed it.
I've had that but I'm old. You think you're shoulder is fucked and it's your neck. It's all connected.
Posted

Was pretty cool when I was in the team store with my kids in about the 7th, and they cleared people out to put out tables and bring in boxes of division champ gear. Reminded me of October 2017. 

Of course, division champ gear is for chumps. Gonna be pretty meaningless by late October. 

  • Like 1
Posted
1 minute ago, Planet Houston said:

Of course, division champ gear is for chumps. Gonna be pretty meaningless by late October. 

My mom asked if I wanted a division champs hat.

I said, "No thanks, just update my World Series Champions hoodie at Christmas."

Posted

Last week of the season :

1. Need to see Correa, peacock and pressley keep progressing and healing up. We need all 3 for the playoffs. 

2. #4 starter ??? It’s not miley, one of the young arms will need to step up.

3. Uncle Mike - he’s slumping hard this month, needs to get back on track 

4. Rest up and stay healthy
 

Posted
10 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Last week of the season :

1. Need to see Correa, peacock and pressley keep progressing and healing up. We need all 3 for the playoffs. 

2. #4 starter ??? It’s not miley, one of the young arms will need to step up.

3. Uncle Mike - he’s slumping hard this month, needs to get back on track 

4. Rest up and stay healthy
 

I'd start Peacock in a Game 4. Hope for 5 innings,  prepare for once through the order. 

Posted

SIAP 

From MLB.com top performances for Saturday in the Arizona Fall League: Whitley’s 2019 campaign didn’t go according to plan, but the highly touted right-hander is off to a strong start in the Arizona Fall League. Whitley, who led the league in strikeouts a season ago, threw 46 of his 83 pitches for strikes and carried a no-hit bid into the fifth inning. The 22-year-old, a first-round pick in the 2016 Draft, retired nine in a row at one point and finished 4 2/3 scoreless innings having given up just one hit and allowing one walk with six strikeouts.

 

 

Posted

Got the email to buy ALDS tickets tomorrow. Game 1 is on Friday Oct 4 and it’s a full slate since the NL starts a day before us.

 

Anyone care to speculate game time? I really fucking hope it’s not an early start.

 

 

Posted (edited)
8 minutes ago, Tommy Nobis said:

Got the email to buy ALDS tickets tomorrow. Game 1 is on Friday Oct 4 and it’s a full slate since the NL starts a day before us.

 

Anyone care to speculate game time? I really fucking hope it’s not an early start.

 

 

I'd be shocked if it wasn't mid afternoon game around 3-4pm.  Early game should be in Atlanta.  Latest game will be @ LAD and prime time will be the fucking yankees 

Edited by Scraps
Posted (edited)

Yeah, I'm not sure Astros have a had a prime time game in the ALDS since the current playoff run started.  It will be an achievement if they aren't the early game.

Edited by kevwun
Posted

If anyone wants ALDS tickets, I wouldn't sweat buying a ticket. Many seats go for close to face value on the secondary markets.  Season ticket holders purchase extra playoff tickets in the hopes of a long playoff run, which can net some decent profit. However they have to commit to every playoff game not just WS tickets. 

In the early games, they sometimes have to let these tickets go for low or no-profit. You might even find some for lower than face value.

My guess is also that we get the afternoon game on that first Friday. NYY and LAD will get prime time. I don't have a problem with that. We will get more than enough prime time later in the month. And if we somehow slipped up in the early round games, I'm happier to not see that on prime time.

Posted
7 minutes ago, runthebone said:

What the hell is that idiot doing...he's a fucking genius!

We're still not winning 2/3 of our games, though. So after another WS title, that will be a worthwhile goal for 2020. :D 

Posted

Got Springers wife to DM me the pic that she took with my buddy. Always kinda weirded me out that her and springer resemble each other in the face. But her body is uhhh nice.

5160d901190b872eb2fe3ffee1f4b33f.jpg

  • Like 2
Posted
15 minutes ago, Gut Wagon said:

We're still not winning 2/3 of our games, though. So after another WS title, that will be a worthwhile goal for 2020. :D 

Umm...we win the last six and we're 108-54. Don't give up yet.  

Posted
Just now, RoundRobin said:

Umm...we win the last six and we're 108-54. Don't give up yet.  

If we win those last six, I'll gladly take credit for being a motivator. Then in 2020 we can shoot for 109-53. 

  • Like 1
Posted

Looks like this is a few weeks old but saw it for the first time last night...not really baseball related but posting because:
1) Reddick cameo
2) it’s a badass commercial
3) the Reddick “strut” was on banner raising night and gets me amped for October baseball. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO






7b435d0cddc83f0f2de4dcfead88f44d.gif
Posted
3 minutes ago, Gut Wagon said:

If we win those last six, I'll gladly take credit for being a motivator. Then in 2020 we can shoot for 109-53. 

We need to win 111 games to make up for losing 111 in 2013.

Posted

Verducci on the key to postseason success:  home runs

https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/09/23/new-york-yankees-la-dodgers-home-run-record

 

 

(notice how the URL mentions the Yankees and Dodgers)

 

Spoiler

Why Home Runs Will Be More Important Than Ever in October

By Tom Verducci
September 23, 2019

Back when Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s made an annual habit of departing early from the playoffs, Beane retaliated against the narrative that his teams didn’t put the ball in play enough, didn’t bunt or steal enough or didn’t defend well enough–in short, that they “weren’t built for the postseason.”

Beane, the executive vice president of baseball operations for Oakland, pointed out that in losing four straight Division Series from 2000-03 his team actually struck out less than its opponents in three of them.

“Do you know what wins in the postseason?” he told me. “Hit more home runs than the other team. That’s what wins. Almost nothing has a greater impact.”

Beane is right. Take the 33 postseason games from last year. Opponents hit the same number of home runs in 10 of those games. In the others, the team that out-homered its opponent went 19-4, an 83% win rate.

Last year the baseball was normal. Now we have a perfectly-balanced, lower-seam, slicker-leather baseball that flies out of the ballpark 21% more often than it did last year. Opposite-field homers of 400 feet or more are up 55% from last year! No wonder Astros ace Justin Verlander talks about how the baseball changed the objective of pitching from getting weak contact to avoiding contact altogether.

This postseason will feature the four greatest home run hitting teams of all time (Yankees, Twins, Astros and Dodgers). This is the greatest slugging season in history (.436) except for 2000. So now you want guys to push the baseball the other way and drop sacrifice bunts? Forget it.

Get ready for a postseason like no other. Forget everything you ever learned about “what wins in the postseason.” Be prepared for games that pivot on just a few swings of the bat. In this environment, with this baseball, with this hitting philosophy, home runs will determine the next world champion.

“Take the Astros’ pitching,” one All-Star pitcher told me recently. “You’re not beating Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole by stringing hits together. Not happening. You’re going to have to hit home runs. The quick strike is how the game is played. On offense you have to take advantage of a couple of mistakes. On the mound, you have to defend against it.”

“Shortening up” against Verlander and Cole to simply “put the ball in play” may not be as smart as you think. Verlander and Cole allow only 2.25 singles per game. They allowed only 19 run-scoring singles in 64 starts–but 62 home runs.

Do you know how many sacrifice bunts the Yankees, Astros and Twins each have after the sixth inning?

Three.

Do you know how many stolen bases the Yankees have in high leverage spots?

Ten.

I asked an American League third base coach in August how many times he had given the hit and run sign this year. “Three,” he said.

People love to talk about “The Golden Age” of baseball, as if one window in the game’s history was better than all others. Here’s the definition of “The Golden Age” of baseball: whatever kind of baseball was being played when you were growing up. Millennials aren’t pining for 1980s style baseball.

People of a certain age like to wax nostalgically about small ball because it was part of the game when they grew up. But that’s not how baseball is played today. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different.

“Small ball” in the postseason has been dying since 2015, when the baseball first became livelier and analytics uncovered the importance of power as a more efficient way to play the game.

Recent world champions made little use of singles and sacrifices, the vaunted jewels of “small ball,” to run through the postseason. The past four World Series champions combined used fewer sacrifice hits in the postseason than did the 2014 Giants. Also take note of the decline in singles on the paths to a title:

Postseason "Small Ball" Tactics by World Series Winner
Team Singles Singles Per Game Sacrifice Hits
2014 Giants 122 7.2 9
2015 Royals 100 6.3 4
2016 Cubs 83 4.9 1
2017 Astros 84 4.6 1
2018 Red Sox 78 5.6 2

The way to a title is with home runs. Trying to win without home runs sounds smart and even quaint, but it’s a losing formula–increasingly so. The odds of winning a postseason game without a home run have gone down since 2015. Let’s look at those games in four-year increments:

Postseason Team Games With No Home Runs

Seasons W-L Record Win Percentage
2003-06 31-56 .356
2007-10 30-58 .341
2011-14 48-76 .387
2015-18 22-66 .333

One homer is nice, but it’s even more important to hit a second home run. First, a snapshot of 2018 postseason outcomes for teams by how many home runs they hit:

2018 Postseason Win Percentage by Home Runs
Home Runs W-L Record Win Percentage
0 7-16 .304
1 10-13 .435
2 10-4 .714
3 4-0 1.000
4 2-0 1.000

That’s 17-29 (.370) when a team hits zero or one homer, and 16-4 (.800) when it hits more than one. That’s a difference in winning percentage of .430, what I call the Multi-Homer Delta.

Let’s grab a larger sample. Let’s look at the Multi-Homer Delta of 2015-18 and compare it to four-year postseason windows of 10, 20, and 30 years ago:

Postseason Outcomes by Home Runs

  2015-18 2005-08 1995-98 1985-88
Zero or One HR 73-112 (.396) 71-92 (.436) 72-103 (.411) 54-64 (.470)
Multi-HR 69-30 (.697) 42-21 (.667) 55-24 (.696) 21-11 (.636)
Multi-HR Delta +.301 +.231 +.285 +.166

Hitting multiple home runs is even more important in today’s postseason baseball.

And remember, we are playing with a hotter baseball than we saw in 2015-18. Major league teams this year won only 344 games without a homer–the fewest such games in history, despite adding more than 2,000 games to the schedule in the expansion era.

A necessary word of warning: don’t make the common mistake people make today of turning complex issues into a binary choice–in this case, home runs or small ball. The subtleties of the game remain important and can swing a game. Just think about how the 2018 World Series began. In the first inning of the first game, Mookie Betts of Boston reached base on a two-strike infield single, stole second base on the next pitch, scored on a single by Andrew Benintendi, who upon the throw home advanced to second and eventually scored on a single by J.D. Martinez. It was a full breadbasket of some fresh small ball: three singles plus a stolen base equaled a 2-0 lead.

You’re bound to see such rallies at various points this postseason, and they are still cool, like vinyl and turntables. It’s just that those rallies happen less often. With the way baseball is played today, and in a tournament with the four greatest home run hitting teams in history, and with a jalapeño of a baseball, the home run is more important than ever–even, or maybe especially, in October.

So as you root for your team in the postseason, savor the multi-hit rallies that may come your way. But what you really should be rooting for is for your team to hit multiple home runs.

 

Posted

The Sunday thing never made any sense cause it would have put Cole on 3 days rest on Saturday.  I really wish this Seattle set would have been Mon-Tue so that Greinke could have closed us out with Miley not getting another start.

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