Jake

Are you telling me that good teams do dumb things sometimes?

Welp

This is more or less a game where the gamble has worked out — so far. When you burn your good reliever early, the downsides are that you don't know whether your offense was ever going to score or if the starter was going to give up a bunch of runs anyway. Today, Burke did his job and the offense has scratched a few across. I'm still not a big fan just because I don't think you want to bet on the Sox offense or Burke that often. I was happier with the strategy last year when they were using lefties to deal with the platoon advantage of opposing lineups that had lefties at the top of the order. Hopefully the final part of the bet, that Leasure and Seranthony will lock it down, works out.

Annoying thing about this opener business is it didn't really buy Burke any platoon advantage and now we don't have our best reliever available to protect this two-run lead late.

Peters is annoying to me

IMO a significant storyline of 2025 was Vargas showing that he was good enough with the glove to play 3B in MLB. Where exactly he'd be on the spectrum from below average to above average, not so clear. But definitely good enough if he had reasonable offense.

Sims is the most generic RHP reliever to exist. Nasty slider, okay fastball, shaky command

Acuna missing the one throw is whatever to me last night. An infielder without many game reps in the outfield is liable to get surprised by how much his outfield throws tail on him. Making the exact same mistake the next batter was the annoying one

I am amenable to basically just trying people out at various spots and seeing how it goes but if you let the defense slip too much it ends up ruining your pitchers

I was going to blame that one on Shane rather than Luisangel but turns out that ball wasn't hit hard either

Think Pereira may have misread that one. Another bloop in the books against Shane

I know this pattern of misses far too well

He was letting it rip in one-inning spring outings last year but he has an upward trajectory in velo in his regular season career [img]

Yeah it's always been pretty much just twist and go

I am weirdly not yet that alarmed by Shane. I was a little concerned by his last two ST outings and I'm not exactly in love with these first two regular season outings, but they are rather different than how he looked in ST. Stuff is still there. Today's outing would be unremarkable if he made a simple throw. Command was worse on opening day but was also let down by his defense with catcher's interference. I'll just wait and see if we get a cleaner outing before I send him to purgatory.

Per Statcast, his velo is up about 1mph across the board relative to his year-long average

When it rains it pours. .080 xBA homer! Gotta strike people out if you don't want that stuff to happen

Curious what's behind the very sinker heavy attack from Shane today. He's living the sinkerballer lifestyle so far with lots of soft contact biting him. His 4 seamer is a quality pitch so I'd think that if even if the sinker is a quality pitch, which it might be, he'd lean on that harder. Maybe he feels like he can command the sinker better but that's not a very common feeling for pitchers between the 4-seam and sinker.

Peters finally pays off all those fake bunts

Curious to see how Shane looks after a very laborious first. Marlins didn't see him well at all but he may lose his stuff from all that work. Not to mention he gets to face the second and third time through the order penalties more quickly.

Nice example of luck and non-luck. Marlins ludicrously lucky in this inning. But! Shane facilitated the entire thing with the fielding mistake. Field the ball and all those softies are scattered across the innings. Now he's thrown so many pitches he may be unable to go much longer. Took 7 batters to get to the first solid contact.

Fun game. Sox had some of the batted ball luck today.

Getz pushed all the right buttons this offseason

Point is not that the Sox should have shut them out. But that inning was propelled by a 50/50 ground ball single followed shortly by an infield single, followed not long after by a bloop single with the bases loaded. Ideally you get some of the other guys out instead, but that sequence of events doesn't normally earn you a 6-run inning. Then you can look backwards and see Sox barreling two outs that could have been home runs with just about anything else being different (park, weather, ball-to-ball variation, etc.). Even earlier in the game, Sox had a sequence of a walk to the 9 hitter followed by 4 batters in a row squaring it up but only got a single run out of it. You can make your own luck to an extent but sometimes things just do or don't line up for you. Overall I liked seeing some life from the bats today and I don't think the Sox will give up too many 6-inning 8th/9th innings going forward. And I was always going to feel a little worried about smaller leads. To me the goal this season is the same as the last: figure out who is part of the core. There have been some interesting data points throughout the series. I think the best player in the organization is on the IL though.

Well that's a tough loss. Hard to see much of a lesson here. Sox hit well and had some serious tough luck. Brewers got all their luck and production focused into one inning. That's the randomness of baseball. Sox aren't going to outplay a team like the Brewers enough to overcome that kind of thing.