Thor'sLinks: Rangers flip story on Halos

Poor Rich Hill. He is pitching brilliantly, with a Perfect Game in progress against the Pirates in Pittsburgh. He is backed by stellar defense on the part of Chase Utley. He gets all the way to the 9th inning when an easy infield ground ball is totally butchered by Logan Forsythe at third base. But he still has the no-hitter going for him. And he ends up closing out the bottom of the 9th with that no-hitter intact. Unfortunately for him, the Dodgers couldn't be bothered to score so the game was not over. Into the 10th we go. Still the Dodgers refuse to score. Hill returns to the bottom of the frame still in pursuit of his no-hitter. He's only thrown 95 pitches so he still has gas. He will throw only 4 more. On that 4th pitch to Josh Harrison, Harrison hits a walk-off solo home run. Hill lost is perfecto, lost his no-hitter. lost his shut-out, and lost the game............

Man, did it suddenly become Open Season on umpires in a hurry, or WTF?...........Let's just start by casting as wide a net as possible and call them names, shall we? Insecure? Self-righteous? I presume the author is a certified psychiatrist who has been granted a private interview/therapy session with every umpire in order to come up with those diagnoses?  And, yeah, get better dammit! Uh, better than what, actually? We can all go a find the one or two or three mistakes a plate ump will make in any game. But take Tuesday night's game. 352 pitches. 3 out of 352 would be better than 99% accurate. And anybody that uses pitch tracking graphics to justify whining about a pitch - especially at the top or bottom of the zone, as this author does - is absolutely clueless concerning what he or she is staring at...........

And we are not done. As MLB and the MLBPA chat about being agreeable to changes in the game to address pace-of-play concerns, the Players might be thinking of holding out support unless they get robot umpiring, and soon. The story goes that a robot would eliminate bickering and speed up the game. Have these guys seen how fun Instant Replay timeouts are? Look, the experts themselves have told us that the tech is not quite there, and not as accurate as human umpires yet, anyway. kudos to some players for being so forward thinking. I doubt many will care for a true strike zone since it differs from what they negotiate with an umpire. But let's cross that bridge while ti's burning, shall we? My guess is that Commissioner Manfred is doing due diligence with the Players Association, but won't pull the trigger on their wishes if it is too radical to implement now. then, he will just do what he wants to do, because the CBA says he can..........

Travis Sawchik over at FanGraphs wants us all to relax, ignore the current limitations of the tech, know that the umpires will still be employed even after robots take over on balls and strikes, and just accept the inevitability..........And Buster Olney has a podcast within which he has Manfred pimping robo-zones. Of course, first you have to get past Olney and Tim Kurkjian talking about themselves before Kurkjian then runs out strawman arguments. But then, in reality, all Manfred is doing is saying that robo umps will eventaully happen. Someday. Which, like, duh..............

The notion from players that sign-stealing is the reason for modern pace-of-play issues can only be logically acceptable if modern players invented sign-stealing. What would be more accurate would be that modern players are less efficient at sign-stealing, or less efficient at preventing sign-stealing. Today's players must be stupid.....There is another perspective on this subject, gone unmentioned. It's obvious that players think the stealing of their signs is an abomination that MLB should not tolerate. But since nobody ever catches anybody stealing signs, there is no actual proof from any team that any other team is doing it. Otherwise, since it's so important, there would be clear and obvious protests. Maybe even fights. There are not. Therefore, the only REAL proof that a team has that sign-stealing is going on is their ongoing knowledge of their own sign-stealing...........

The Baseball Big Book of Rules is loaded with page after page of stuff. If you grew up with the game you probably know 95% of it anyway. But you don't know all of them. You certainly don't know what is behind all of them, and what is behind some of them is pretty crazy shit..........

If you know somebody who drones on about Baseball being a 1-0 dullard, Direct them to this: a 1-0 historic classic..........

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The #1 reason it sucks to be a Yankees fan, is that you are surrounded by Yankees fans...........Excellent reason to read UniWatch: finding uber cool vintage baseball pics like this..........Ken Rosenthal, getting sucked into the The Athletic like so many from an entire generation of writers getting bludgeoned by flip-to-video..........MFY skipper Joe Girardi pulled Aaron Judge from a blowout win before the game was over, and the locals wonder if this was to keep Judge from striking out and extending his streak? Boss Joe sez No..........Players are going to get personalized bats to accompany their personalized jerseys for Player's Weekend. MLB Store just can't wait to get their hands on all that one-of-a-kind game used merchandise to sell to all of you..........