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My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 3 weeks ago. Tomorrow she starts her treatment. She's been a wreck ever since the diagnosis. I mentioned a few pages back how a friend of the family manage

Rustic Horn
Rustic Horn
Mez2
Mez2

Newest Astro fan was born earlier today at 12:09 am Mez3, holla!

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29223

Posted
Posted
13 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

just to clarify, according to girardi, the yankees starting pitching staff is much better than they get credit for.

against the twins:

paxton - 4.2ip

tanaka - 5ip

severino - 4ip

their bullpen can be nasty, but no need to act like they're trotting out ryan, carlton, and seaver.  once again, it'll be about whether all the relievers can be "on" on a given day.  the rays guys were for the most part.  i guess we'll see.  but it's nice to know our guys can all go 6-8 innings.

and it should be said, in those 13.2ip, they gave up 4er.  oh noes!

(i'm really just posting to see if i can draw out mez again)

#truckerhatmafia

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29223

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In the 3rd inning, Gerrit Cole didn't record a strikeout. Cole had recorded at least 1 strikeout in 73 consecutive innings (reg. and postseason) dating back to Aug. 1. It was the longest such streak in the Expansion Era (since 1961)....by 33 innings.

https://sports.yahoo.com/alds-game-5-astros-are-heading-to-the-alcs-after-another-gerrit-cole-gem-022031038.html

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Mo Horn

Mo Horn 8933

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Posted

 If I'm Hinch I do 3 things for the next series:

Swap Peacock for Miley... If he's healthy 

Switch back to the lineup that's worked all year... Altuve #2 & Brantley #3

Start Tucker and stay with him... Yea he's been overmatched so far but he can't be worse than Reddick and he has more upside. 

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Iceman

Iceman 2956

Posted
Posted (edited)
28 minutes ago, Mo Horn said:

 If I'm Hinch I do 3 things for the next series:

Swap Peacock for Miley... If he's healthy 

Switch back to the lineup that's worked all year... Altuve #2 & Brantley #3

Start Tucker and stay with him... Yea he's been overmatched so far but he can't be worse than Reddick and he has more upside. 

Couldn't agree more.  What is there to lose by starting Ted?  and extra base or two by opposing baserunners because he doesn't have a hose like Reddick?

His bat could easily counter that, and more...

Edited by Iceman
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Gourmand

Gourmand 7778

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Stark: Gerrit Cole’s historic run is becoming impossible to put into words

Spoiler

HOUSTON – Great teams don’t lose games like this. Great pitchers don’t let them.

Teams that win 107 games don’t lose winner-take-all October baseball games. Teams that win 107 games don’t blow two-games-to-none leads in a postseason series. That’s not a thing that has ever happened – in the history of this sport or in the history of October. But it could have happened Thursday night to the 2019 Houston Astros.

Except then they handed the baseball – and the fate of their magical season – to a man named Gerrit Cole. Good plan.

“When you have Gerrit Cole on the mound,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch, on the night his team finally finished off the Tampa Bay Rays, “we win.”

Yep, they win, all right. They win. They win. And then they win some more. They won Game 5 of this ALDS, 6-1, behind Cole’s latest 2019 masterpiece. And that’s becoming a more familiar sight than the sun rising in the eastern sky.

Hinch’s team hasn’t lost a game when Cole took the mound since July 12. It hasn’t lost when Cole took the mound in Houston since May 22. And let’s remind you that’s almost five freaking months ago.

Gerrit Cole is 18-0 in those five freaking months. Yeah, 18 and 0! If you’re thinking that seems like a lot of games to win in a row, let’s just say you’re on the right track. According to STATS LLC, to find the last pitcher who won that many games in a row within a single season, you would have to go back 107 years – to 1912, when Rube Marquard spun off 19 in a row for John McGraw’s New York Giants. We’d cue up the Rube Marquard videotape now, except that was like six decades before the invention of videotape.

What Cole did to the Rays on Thursday, in Game 5 of this American League Division Series, looked a lot like what he did to them in Game 2. Like what he’s been doing against every team that’s appeared in his path over these past five months. Like what he’s been doing since he arrived in Houston two seasons ago for that matter.

Eight innings. Two hits. Ten strikeouts. And 19 more swings and misses. Spray the champagne.

“He’s a bad man,” said his grateful teammate, George Springer. “And I’m glad he’s on our team.”

To call this domination doesn’t really capture it. How about historic domination? Would that do it? What we’re seeing is a guy who feels like he just walked off the screen of your Xbox One and started making major-league hitters look like your kids’ Tee Ball team.

Here’s a quick summation of what he did to the Tampa Bay Rays in his two starts in this ALDS:

54 Batters Faced

25 Strikeouts

6 Hits

1 Run

52 Swings and misses

.118/.167/.196 opponent slash line

Seriously? In real life? That would be ridiculous enough in a vacuum. But now let’s put that vacuum away and remind you of what those same Rays hitters did in the intermission between Cole’s starts in Game 2 and Game 5.

In the two games – plus four outs – following the moment Cole left the mound in the eighth inning of Game 2, the Rays went out and hit .351 against pitchers not named Gerrit Cole, with six home runs and 15 runs scored. Then came Cole Time on a turbo-charged Thursday evening at Minute Maid Park. And all that Rays mashing came to an immediate stop – because the man on the mound is about as unhittable right now as any pitcher who ever lived.

“He’s got every pitch in every quadrant of the zone,” said Alex Bregman, as champagne dripped off his goggles like a human Niagara Falls. “He’s just special. … He came over here and said I need to learn to strike people out. And I think he’s done a pretty good job of that.”

Ha. Ya think? Cole has now struck out 351 hitters this year in 228 innings, between the regular season and postseason. That’s the most K’s in one year (counting both the regular season and postseason) by a right-handed pitcher in 45 years – since some guy named Nolan Ryan whiffed 367 in 1974.

And Cole has now punched out 25 hitters in two postseason starts – the most over any two-start span of any pitcher who ever took an October mound, with the exception of the great Bob Gibson, who still holds that record with 27, in the 1968 World Series.

So has any postseason starter been more dominant than Cole in the half-century since? We asked our friends at STATS to put Cole’s overpowering October in historical perspective. Here’s what they found:

52 SWINGS AND MISSES IN ONE SERIES – Think that’s a lot? It’s a lot! It’s the most swings and misses ever recorded by any pitcher in any postseason series in the pitch-count era – which dates back to 1988. The second-most? That would be 46, by Mike Mussina in the 1997 ALCS.

52 SWINGS AND MISSES IN BACK-TO-BACK GAMES – Think that feels slightly historic? For good reason. How many pitchers have induced that much swinging and missing in any two consecutive postseason games in the pitch-count era? Right. That would be none. The next-most is 48 – by Tim Lincecum in the 2010 NLCS and Tim Belcher in the 1988 NLCS.

STRIKING OUT 46 PERCENT OF HITTERS FACED IN A POSTSEASON SERIES – Cole pitched to 54 hitters in this ALDS and whiffed 46.3 percent of them. That would be the highest rate in postseason history among pitchers who faced that many hitters in one series. But if we leave out the number of batters faced and lower the bar just to pitchers who made at least two starts in the same series, Mussina actually holds this record with 47.2 percent (25 of 53) in that ’97 ALCS. But Cole would still be second.

25 STRIKEOUTS, 6 HITS IN A POSTSEASON SERIES – When a guy piles up a strikeout rate of more than four times as many whiffs as hits this time of year, that’s something you don’t see a whole lot, either. In fact, only two pitchers have had a better rate in any postseason series ever. There’s Mussina again (25 K, 4 hits, 6.25 K/H) and Kevin Brown (21 K, 5 hits, 4.20 K/H in the 1998 NLCS). But that’s it – in postseason history.

So think about this. Pedro Martinez never had a postseason run quite like this. Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling never did this. Madison Bumgarner, Roy Halladay, Josh Beckett, Jack Morris couldn’t match what we’re seeing from the Houston Astros’ No. 2 starter. Anyone else find that fairly amazing?

Beyond that, Cole extended his streak of double-figure strikeout games to 11 in a row. And no pitcher who ever played baseball has done that, either. So we couldn’t help but ask Cole how he feels when he hears words like “history” and “historic” being used to describe what he’s up to these days. He smiled. He gathered his thoughts. Then he answered this way:

“I’m flattered,” he said. “And I’ll have a drink about it in December.”

Yeah, pour this man a bourbon – and a $300 million contract.

His teammates and his manager talked Thursday about how good it felt to be heading for the park, to play a game they needed to win to save their season, and knowing Cole was pitching. Could you blame them?

“We know he’s going to come out hot,” Hinch said. “We know he’s going to get his strikeouts. We know he’s going to set a tone. He’s intense. There’s no mistaking … what his priority is, which is to get deep in the game and give us a chance to win.”

But even better than that, once his offense got him four runs to work with in the first 17 pitches they saw, what Gerrit Cole actually gave them was zero percent chance to lose. He had all four pitches humming. He got swings and misses with every one of them. And he was throwing harder in the eighth inning than the first, hitting 99 miles per hour with his 100th pitch and 102nd. Asked about that afterward, Cole replied, succinctly: “It’s just what I do.”

Well, because that’s what he does, his team is now bound for an epic ALCS heavyweight title bout with those 103-win Yankees, starting Saturday in Houston. The bad news is that, because they needed him just to survive this Division Series, it means the Astros won’t have Cole available to start until Game 3 in Yankee Stadium. So they’ll just have to get by with their two Cy Youngs – Zack Greinke in for Game 1 and Justin Verlander in Game 2.

But never forget these Astros are more than just a collection of aces. They’re a 107-win team that’s fueled by the opportunity to put its mark on history, by winning a second World Series in the midst of three consecutive 100-win seasons. That’s a feat so rare that no Yankees team has ever done it – and no team has done it, period, since the 1942-43-44 Cardinals. So this is a team with a lot on its plate. But none of it would have mattered if they hadn’t survived Thursday night.

“I think everybody in here knows that we have a chance to do something extremely special,” said Alex Bregman. “We’ve won a lot of games. We think we’ve got all stars at every position. So now there’s only one thing left to do. And that’s win.”

 

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gecko

gecko 1104

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11 hours ago, gecko said:

We need to steady ourselves to the fact that we’re probably going to end up losing this game

 

To all you neg repping me for the above....I did my part to insure the win, what did you do?  And to continue my streak...

We need to steady ourselves to the fact that we're probably going to end up losing to OU 48-0.

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9789

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Some great tidbits in that stark article.
Just some otherworldly stuff



I also liked this Bregs quote to wrap it up:

“I think everybody in here knows that we have a chance to do something extremely special,” said Alex Bregman. “We’ve won a lot of games. We think we’ve got all stars at every position. So now there’s only one thing left to do. And that’s win.”

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Hank Chinaski

Hank Chinaski 6345

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2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

reddick and tucker are equally horrible. Can we get jd martinez back ?

I'd play Marisnick instead of Reddick in each game. He's not a worse hitter (Jake probably has a little more pop, actually) and he upgrades the OF defense. This seems like a no-brainer to me at this point. Reddick just doesn't add anything of value. 

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Johnny Sack

Johnny Sack 8397

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Just now, Hank Chinaski said:

I'd play Marisnick instead of Reddick in each game. He's not a worse hitter (Jake probably has a little more pop, actually) and he upgrades the OF defense. This seems like a no-brainer to me at this point. Reddick just doesn't add anything of value. 

And Reddick does not even work counts.  He is lost up there.  

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Player

Player 4605

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57 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

Some great tidbits in that stark article.
Just some otherworldly stuff



I also liked this Bregs quote to wrap it up:

“I think everybody in here knows that we have a chance to do something extremely special,” said Alex Bregman. “We’ve won a lot of games. We think we’ve got all stars at every position. So now there’s only one thing left to do. And that’s win...”

Win-the-whole-thing-300x300.jpg

"...the whole fucking thing."

FIFB

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huge

huge 3825

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Posted
19 minutes ago, Gut Wagon said:

Few things bring me more joy than watching Brett "The Goiter" Gardner whiff against one of our guys in a big spot. His look of disgust and rage is something I'll never get enough of. Hope to see it early and often.

His tears taste like Pliny...

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IDIOTsavant

IDIOTsavant 8673

Posted
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Posted this in For Sale, but know this is my target audience, so I'm cross posting:

 

Going to Dallas this weekend, so I'm not going to make the ALCS. I've got 2 SRO tickets for Game 1, and 4 in Section 405, Row 2, Seats 5-8. Face for each was $110, but processing fees made them $121 each. Would like to get $150 per ticket for Game 1 and $175 per ticket for Game 2. Tickets are through MLB Ballpark app, and payment is through Venmo. They use Bluetooth, so no HDMI ports. Best buy coupons sweeten your offer...obviously.

 
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TexArcher

TexArcher 38816

Posted
Posted (edited)
8 minutes ago, Gut Wagon said:

Sorry I'm a little late with this. It might even have been posted somewhere above. But I wonder if the author still believes the drivel he put out there about Cole being "only human." 

https://www.draysbay.com/2019/10/10/20908078/mlb-postseason-tampa-bay-rays-gerrit-cole-alds-game-five

Quit reading at "Behind the support of a loud home crowd, the Rays..."

We all saw those tarped seats, Homer.

Edited by TexArcher
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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9789

Posted
Posted
Posted this in For Sale, but know this is my target audience, so I'm cross posting:
 
Going to Dallas this weekend, so I'm not going to make the ALCS.
 


Obligatory: why not both?

I’m giving the TX/ou, HOU/NYY doubleheader a go Saturday (and starting out in Austin).

This is going to be really really amazing or really really awful.
(FWIW, I’m 7-0 in Astro playoff games at home since 2015 (team 14-5)...I won’t get in to my Tx/ou record)
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IDIOTsavant

IDIOTsavant 8673

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1 minute ago, UTexasFight said:

 


Obligatory: why not both?

I’m giving the TX/ou, HOU/NYY doubleheader a go Saturday (and starting out in Austin).

This is going to be really really amazing or really really awful.
(FWIW, I’m 7-0 in Astro playoff games at home since 2015 (team 14-5)...I won’t get in to my Tx/ou record)

 

Because I live in San Antonio now and have a terrible case of the olds...wish I could still pull this off.

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kevwun

kevwun 16269

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Posted (edited)

The Astros don't like giving long contracts to pitchers, so I don't think they will re-sign him.  Someone is going to offer him 5 or 6 years.  It would be possible money wise if Crane was willing to go in to the luxury tax and if they traded Greinke this winter to free up some money.

Edited by kevwun
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HtownHorn

HtownHorn 15243

Posted
Posted

Cash showed the Yankees how to beat the Astros. Bullpen them to death. Going to be interesting to see how long the Yankee starters go, because their bullpen is probably on par with Tampa's. Tampa just couldn't do anything against Game 1 Verlander and Cole, which is why you have those 2 guys.

Though not the way the Astros would have preferred the rotation being set out, the Yankees are still going to have to win at least 3 of the 6 Greinke, Verlander, and Cole starts in this series.

Every post season start adds $10-15M to Cole's contract.

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ChickenSandwich

ChickenSandwich 9918

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

Cash showed the Yankees how to beat the Astros. Bullpen them to death. Going to be interesting to see how long the Yankee starters go, because their bullpen is probably on par with Tampa's. Tampa just couldn't do anything against Game 1 Verlander and Cole, which is why you have those 2 guys.

Though not the way the Astros would have preferred the rotation being set out, the Yankees are still going to have to win at least 3 of the 6 Greinke, Verlander, and Cole starts in this series.

Every post season start adds $10-15M to Cole's contract.

Dodgers bullpen fell apart in the WS in 17. They don’t want the pitchers to go through the lineup 3 times, but seeing the same pitchers in each game can have the same effect. 

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formermav43

formermav43 4607

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Posted
36 minutes ago, housious said:

Probably a dumb question, but I don't feel like reading through 591 pages of comments. Is it realistic that the Astros can re-sign Cole with the way he's pitching? Will they have to ship other talent elsewhere to make room for him? Have they been in the luxury tax in past? 

No. It’s not. Even if they shipped out other talent, even if they went into the tax, I don’t think they would meet his demands. 
 

And I know it’s not popular right now, but I’m ok with that. Cole was a career underachiever before they acquired him. Rather than hitching themselves to him longterm, they need to wish him well and find the next guy to maximize (see, to a lesser extent, Morton, Miley, even guys like McHugh, Harris, etc.).

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9789

Posted
Posted
Dodgers bullpen fell apart in the WS in 17. They don’t want the pitchers to go through the lineup 3 times, but seeing the same pitchers in each game can have the same effect. 

Ding ding ding

Cash and the Rays almost got away with it because it was a short series.
I’m a firm believer that any perceived advantage because of a superior bullpen is much much more mitigated the longer a series goes (relative to other strengths/weaknesses of a team).
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