Jake

Postgame show is showing Sam botch the route and there's not enough baseball knowledge in the broadcast for anyone to comment on that fact

He's pitching to the 9 hitter, has already walked a batter in the inning, and threw a ball well above the zone designed to generate either a whiff or a weak fly ball, which he got. Don't overthink it.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the outfielders should be playing in for that AB. There is nothing wrong with the positioning. If your goal is to maximize the chance that you make the out, you bring in the outfielders. The only reason they normally play as far back as they do is because you're worried about doubles. In that specific game situation, you have the additional reason that if they somehow still hit it in front of you, if you are playing close you might prevent them from sending the winning run home from second. Add on top of that the fact that Rocchio is a slap hitter who makes a living slapping balls in front of outfielders. Sam appears to have badly misplayed the ball but even if he hadn't, it's just a ball that found a hole.

I'm okay with a strategic day off or two for Mune (tomorrow would be smart), but he has to play. The team is built around him. Teams do not perma-bench guys like that in the final two weeks of the season. You can move him down in the order, but we know that batting order is not that important so I would defer the decision on that to whatever I thought would be most likely to have a positive (or non-negative) effect on his mental approach. This is not some really good team that is only bad if Mune plays. You're playing the probabilities here and so much of the team's upside lives with Mune getting straightened out. So just do whatever maximizes the likelihood that Mune starts hitting.

The final pitch was actually a sinker. If that was intentional, then that was stupid. It almost makes me wonder whether Grant is occasionally having bad releases on his fastballs that are making them look like sinkers.

Grant certainly could have gotten out of it and probably deserved to, but like I said during the inning you probably should have just put Newcomb in.

Right he's also playing in to increase the likelihood of getting an out. You switch from "no doubles" to "no hits"

Because he misread the ball

Sam took a bad route. It's on him

I mean it's just the standard strategy. You know a double beats you either way so you're trying to take away singles and be able to hold the go-ahead run if one does get in front of you. It does leave you vulnerable to the parachute into the corner but there's no perfect strategy

Playing in so he can throw out a runner at home on a ground ball single

Yeesh. Lucky bastards

A single ends it in the bad way

Can't do it, but you'd like to see Newcomb in the game here

Grant is having weird reactions to his pitches.

Grant still not looking all that sharp. Hope he can pitch around it. Batters just haven't been off balance as he changes speeds. Don't know if he's just losing a bit of deception, if his sequences are predictable, or if he's got a tip.

Connor should consider not calling everything hard hit

The wind must be howling

I hope we have somebody loose.

I'm done running on Kwan so I can live with it.

Hmm, I thought we were scoring two there.

As far as the much-discussed platoon splits go for Colson, just FWIW he has hit righties who use changeups well.

When the Driveline guy was running the show in Cincinnati, they banned their RHP from pickoff moves in the minors. They ran the numbers and found that you're far more likely to have an error on the pickoff than actually getting the guy out. They focused on timing and better deliveries and were the best minor league org at holding on baserunners with RHP on the mound.

"Bench the Montgomerys" "No, not like that!!"

Murphy as an opener is a shrug for me. Cleveland is very left-handed. Part of Davis's improvement this season is that he's gotten better at getting lefties out, but it's still a weakness for him — and we still aren't totally sure which version of Davis we're getting. Murphy has pitched fairly well this year and has great stuff. And, importantly, I don't care about not having him available later in the game. That's a big difference from when the Sox used Taylor, Newcomb, and to a lesser extent Hudson as an opener. Murphy may or may not pitch well as an opener today, but I think it's reasonable to see him as likelier to throw the inning(s) more effectively than Davis and that Davis wasn't likely to go deep regardless. So you've got: An unusually left-handed opponent A righty starter who you're unsure how much to trust A surplus lefty reliever Go ahead and use the opener then. I'll make a note that Murphy doesn't have much in the way of platoon splits this year or in the past which frankly doesn't make a ton of sense to me given his slider-heavy approach. But yeah, let's see how it goes.