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(Author’s note: I will come up with an off-season format to organize all the links once the playoffs are over. Right now I am too GA to deal with it.)
PLAYOFFS
The Milwaukee Brewers ran through September with 20 wins against only 7 losses. During the last few weeks they had gone 11-1 and they had done a lot of that without superstar Christian Yelich.
Overall they won 89 games on the season. But the last one was Thursday. They lost a game 11-7, then two walk-offs in a row...3-2 and then 4-3. The magic was wearing thin.
Last night there was one final spark of fire when the Brewers took on Max Scherzer and grabbed a 3-0 lead, 3-1 by the time Scherzer hit the showers. 3-1 going into the bottom of the 8th. 3-1 when Brewers manager Craig Counsell turned the affair over to Josh Hader, one of the top 5 relievers in MLB for 2019. Hader actually 2 outs on his side in that 8th, and was right on the verge of a third in between those two. Then the bells started tolling. It was 11:00PM. Bong. It was tolling for the Brewskies. Bong... As it tolled... bong..... single...... bong....... walk........ bong......... single.......... bong............. one runner across................ bong....................the tying runner across........................ bong..............................misplay by right fielder Trent Grisham, the guy who was playing RF to replace the injured Christian Yelich and a guy who had not committed a fielding error in his entire 51-game old MLB career........................................ bong..........................................................go ahead run scores. Top of 9th 1-2-3.....bong Season over..........bong.
So that was fast. Fun. But fast. MLB should do more of that. Let’s be like hockey and let all the non-Division winning teams play their final games as a single elimination playoff system where the last 2 standing crank up the LDS series.
If you know me well enough by now, I don’t think of The Wild Card Game as “The Playoffs”. I see it as a “play-in game”. At a minimum, I will keep this opinion until the 1995 Angels are credited with being a playoff team. And imagine if we had some 4-way tie at the end of the regular season and had to do a series of single elimination tie-breakers just to set the two single elimination WC game. Those earlier single elimination game events would not be “playoffs”. Just the last single elimination event. Even if the two WC teams are tied...........
This can be pretty simple. Now that the NL play-in game is behind us, TBS is your go-to channel for all NL games all the way up to the World Series, and FS1 is your channel for your AL games all the way up to the ALCS. After those two check points it’s all FOX. This is true except for the opening Twins at Yankees game, which is MLB Network. So except for that, its TBS or FS1 until it’s FOX. Done...........
ANGELS
“Did not produce to our forecast”. That, instead of “Our forecast was stupendously incorrect.” See the difference? The former version is their fault. The latter version is our fault..........
The sun rose from the eastern horizon yesterday morning. In other totally unexpected news, now that the Angels have agreed not to retain Skipper Brad, they have started to choose not to retain employees that Skipper’s replacement might not want hanging around. Like coaches Doug White and Josh Paul. I do feel sorry for these guys being now unemployed (despite me not being a big fan of White as a coach), but I would guess that they are better prepared for the nature of their careers than I am..........
What I find more disconcerting is this tidbit from Maria Insider, that “Numerous pitchers had trouble adjusting to White’s ideas, including youngsters Jaime Barria and Jose Suarez”. I would have thought that every modern MLB franchise creates a unified coaching methodology for all skills from the MLB level on down, so that prospects coming up are prepared to act, work, perform, be managed and coached, and execute the overall philosophy of the franchise, and all this is authored and managed from the MLB staff itself..........But, boy, ain’t the web site coders quick with the page changes these days..........
This official update just in from the Angels: “The Angels decided to part with Brad Ausmus long before word came out that Joe Maddon would be available.” Which can be totally 100% completely accurate and accepted with full confidence because this is an official message direct from the Angels, right?.............By the way, if he ends up in Anaheim I am calling him “Moon” Joe Maddon. You read it here first...........
Be afraid. Be very afraid: “Maddon will be brought in for an interview, but so will Joe Girardi, who worked with Angels GM Billy Eppler with the New York Yankees. Buck Showalter, John Farrell and Ron Washington also are among the candidates. The Angels want a manager with major-league experience, meaning that John Farrell, Dusty Baker, Ozzie Guillen and Bo Porter could be in the mix, too.”..........Personally, I happen to notice that not one of those names is spelled Darin Erstad (who holds a head coaching record of 267–193–1)...........
One theory suggests that Joe Maddon could be the guy who convinces Gerrit Cole to come to Anaheim. Something that always get said is how Cole was born in Newport Beach and how he grew up in Orange County and how he went to UCLA. As if that makes him a tried and true Southern Californian who yearns to come back and play for his hometown Angels. Was is not remembered is how Cole, while attending nearby Orange Lutheran High School, was not a fan of the Angels. You know those games where hordes of confused people show up wearing Yankees caps and root for the wrong team? Yeah, young Gerrit was one of those...........
BASEBALL
MLB has a new marketing campaign. “We Play Loud”. The visuals are pretty cool. Cody Bellinger plays loud. Ronald Acuna, Jr. plays loud. Aaron Judge plays loud and so does Gleyber Torres. Anthony Rendon, Jack Flaherty, Alex Bregman, Juan Soto, Eddie Rosario and Byron Buxton all play very loud. A bunch of guys flash quickly by playing loud. Mike Trout, though, he apparently doesn’t play loud enough to play loud...........
Life is full of choices. Some choices are more risky than others. I am talking about baseball stadium safety netting here, but not the way you now think I am.....One such life choice is to publish a story about fan injuries at baseball stadiums as an implied argument for more safety netting AND choosing not to tell the whole story so as to not allow your readership to make an informed opinion.....This NBC News report that extrapolates 800 injuries from foul balls at MLB stadiums over the 7 seasons is just that sort of thing. The writers are very careful to note how actual data is impossible to come by because there are not mandatory, formalized, collective tracking systems. Yes, that is a concern we might want to have, but for the authors it is self-serving to point that out because they want you to be upset about the probability of far greater numbers.....But let’s start with what they categorize as an “injury”. We get this snippet: “Some are from home runs and batting practice. In other cases, fans were injured as they scrambled to catch balls flying into the stands” [emphasis mine]. So a ball lands into a vacant area of the fan seating area and some dude with far more confidence in his grade-school athleticism than is warranted trips and stumbles and flops over a row of empty seats as he goes racing to pick up the idle baseball and he gets bruised up in the process. Check! We write that up as a count in favor of the danger of screaming line fouls into the dugout stands.....And we get this other snippet: “176 out of 193 total calls of reported injuries from baseballs could be mapped out by seat sections. They show a majority of the calls for these reported injuries occurring outside of the protective netting.” Um, that means that 9% of injuries from baseball didn’t even happen to people in the seats (17 out of the 193), so what’s netting supposed to do for those? It also means that netting does not protect from injuries, since a minority of events still happened between fans and foul balls behind netting (you can see that yourself on the Coors Field seating chart). And, the big one here which is a huge DUH!, the majority of instances might have come from outside the protective netting because the majority of fans sit outside the protective netting?!? Why couldn’t the authors done the honest thing and work out the math on the rations and say something more like “It’s x% more likely to be seriously injured due to direct impact from a foul baseball while sitting outside the protective netting”??? Could it possibly be because they did do that math, found that the difference is not alarming enough to agree with the point they want to make, so they shit-canned that information?.....Give me the damned information and let me agree or disagree honestly, dammit..........But don’t give me any t-shirt cannons..........
Nothing says stupid like the guy with the purse strings holding his payroll $50 million under the tax threshold coming out JUST DAYS after concluding a season where he drew almost 3 million fans and JUST HOURS after signing an extension to his TV mega-deal financial parachute, and telling the world on a slow news day that money is tight..........
THE Doug Eddings will be back in the playoffs real soon, as part of the crew that will be umpiring the NLDS between the Dodgers and the Nationals..............
Home runs could ruin the playoffs more than umpires: “For now, though, the deceptive—and, by historical standards, undeserved—dinger is a constant threat. While the ideal home run rate is ultimately a matter of taste, frequent, uncontrolled fluctuations that rewrite the ground rules are probably more of a bug than a feature...In October, that bug could be game-breaking.”..........
Latin American players make up almost 30% of MLB rosters.....It’s 2019, almost 2020, and the St. Louis Cardinals are only just now committing to full Spanish-speaking coverage throughout their playoff existence..........
Sign good players, win games. Intriguing. We should look into that..........
The Mets are wasting Pete Alonso and Jacob deGrom............
DISH is at it again. More sports content locked in another carriage dispute, and in another major market.........
STUFF
Credit where credit is due. One fan puts his money where his mouth is. Well, probably your money and my money, if “Mattress Mack” has tax accountants worth a plug nickel............
Mad props to Theo Epstein, for spinning the Cubs decline as a “winner’s trap”..........
Brock Holt, one cool baseball guy!..........
(h/t Uniwatch) Something you will not be able to unsee..........
