Jake

Just occurred to me who Lopez reminds me of the most: Edwin Jackson.

At Illinois State, faculty pay makes up 33% of the budget (link). In the Cal system, about 25% and about 40% in the Cal State system (link). I'm not sure how that differs at smaller institutions, although not many of them would be D1 in athletics.

Saw some discussion recently about Yoan wanting to make teams stop shifting on him as a lefty. That will help

Feels like we've been asking our good relievers to go multiple innings more than in the past. Of course, the Ricky era hasn't exactly been characterized by "good relievers"

I think the Cordell bunt was the result of trying to weigh the relatively unlikelihood that he gets a hit and relatively higher likelihood of double play

Seems to me that McCann probably helped Cease out big time today. Realized Cease was getting more mileage out of his offspeed and just kept calling it. Had some bold sequences, like tripling up the change to strike out the lefty. I bet he wasn't getting that with Collins and Zavala, especially if he was doing more of his own pitch calling. Sometimes a catcher believes in some of your pitches more than you do and pushes you into using them.

12 changeups by my count

I thought that was just a little popup but it was 101mph off the bat

Cease is from Milton, Georgia

Some really good baserunning there

Really nice late fade on the changeup there. But it's way too slow.

Starter

woops

So is this 85 yellow hammer his slider or is he throwing two speeds of his curveball and has another, distinct pitch he uses as his slider?

Cease can't complain about the umpiring

McCann is cancelled

I liked seeing the recognition that he had a better feel for his hook than his fastball and McCann making that adjustment

Besides the badness of our other options, part of the logic of calling him up may well be to get him with our MLB coaching staff to work through these things.

Wendell Carter Jr. will miss the summer league due to surgery to repair a "core muscle injury." Bulls say he'll be ready for training camp.

We're going to be trying to win next year. We won't be in a position to be giving Dylan Covey or Hector Santiago some starts just to screw around with Kopech's service time.

I'm not sure that there's much to read into with this autopsy stuff. Maybe if it's suicide or drug overdose, the family would be worried about people deciding to stop memorializing him or something. But it might also just be that they want the public attention to die down as soon as it can and the release of an autopsy report so soon will prolong the story into a couple more news cycles.

Big question is what his attitude will be like. Every now and then you get signs from the Bulls that they think there may have been effort/attitude problems with Dunn. If he's going to wreck what's looking like it will be a group of good team guys, you might have to move him.

Hard to see Dunn sticking around with 4 PG on the team now.

Arcidiacono back to the Bulls. 3 years, $9 million

While this is probably not a very big factor anymore, I don't doubt whatsoever that the long shadow of MJ had its effect for a while. Do you think LeBron wanted to stake his career on a fanbase that would never call him the GOAT?