Jake

If we're going to share extra innings W-L splits, I'll note the Sox are 0-fer on the road.

The irony is growing up, I saw the Cardinals fans as my friend. We could unite against the evil Cubbies. But now living far away from the situation, I've grown to be very annoyed with The Greatest Fans in Baseball as well.

I should note that I probably hate the Packers and their fans more. BUT in that case the Packers fans I've known are the people who live their whole lives in Illinois and decided to like the Packers. But my biggest ire is reserved for the Cubs-Packers fans, of which there are many in the downstate where I grew up. I see fandom of both teams as fundamentally anti-Chicago

I've done some reflection on my hatred of the Cubs because a lot of normal people don't get it. What I've realized is I hate their fans specifically, lol. This is not something that makes more sense to normal people who have never been around there.

I'm still with Will there TBH. The whole inning comes down to how do I keep a runner from scoring from 2nd with nobody out. You know the runner is most likely to score and if he does score, it doesn't really matter how. By far your best bet is getting strikeouts, which pushes you towards going to the strikeout pitcher. The strikeout pitcher that you have is left-handed and has serious issues preventing walks. The lefty hitter in question strikes out 30% of the time. And your pitcher walks right-handed hitters a significantly larger proportion of the time. So do you put men on first and second to face right-handed Seiya, who is an absolute beastly hitter against LHP? And has below league average K% against LHP? That's the guy who is your biggest obstacle to getting through that inning without contact. Of course as we saw, there were plenty of obstacles. There are a lot of ways to lose with those hitters coming up and a free baserunner on second representing the winning run. It's very annoying for the shithead PCA to walk you off but it's not really any different than any of the other ways you could lose. You're trying to figure out how can I make my 15-20% chance to keep them from scoring go to 30% or 40%.

Hagen has a quite extreme release point and he throws harder than most guys who release it so far to the side. Most of those guys have fastballs that play well above their velo and shape metrics. He pairs it with high extension which is also unusual and helps a fastball play above the velo reading. The other thing that is true of most of the few guys who release it where he does is that they struggle to throw strikes. Most similar release point to Hagen's in the league is actually Bryan Hudson, whose career has been defined by whether he can fill up the zone. You can see how Hudson gets by: he just kinda aims at the middle of the zone and lets the chips fall where they may (usually the batter fails to square up a 91mph heater in the meat of the plate)

Well a good challenge is one you win. Sam in particular has absolutely brutally-timed challenges and so frequently on pitches that aren't even close. I don't know why he does that. Sam and Mune are both high-volume, low-success challengers who often use them early. I'll give catchers more grace on firing off the challenges relatively early. I think that's the Sox philosophy too that they really don't want the hitters burning challenges at all. Yet Sam loves the "I'm fooled the first time seeing a pitcher and have to challenge it early in the count" challenge. Have to tie his hands at this point

Yeah I'm upset with Rogers but like you say, it's such a bad miss that it baits the players into bad challenges.

I have to think Rogers has at least a little more in the tank than this, but his first couple games with the Sox could hardly have been any worse

Webb is on a 22.2 IP scoreless streak. Good golly

Tie game in the bottom of the 10th with the Manfred man, I don't like Brazoban. He's a contact pitcher, it's going to be real hard for him to keep that runner from scoring

I don't really have complaints with any of Will's decisions in this one. I think his only options were Hagen, Brazoban, and Fedde in the 10th. You needed to minimize the chance of contact. Hagen was the right dice roll IMO. Have to pitch to PCA because Hagen is too wild to give them a free runner. He walks righties way more than lefties. PCA sat slider and got one. Oh well.

Well that stinks. Thanks a lot ump

Hagen isn't exactly someone I trust, but he's the kind of pitcher who has a higher-than-usual chance of not giving anything up. Just a higher chance than usual of giving up a lot. But giving up a lot is moot, so you could do worse than this.

Looked like Tristan didn't get out of the box there

Just stick the bat out and see what happens

Great AB Braden

Braden had no doubt

Give the pitcher and catcher time to think it through with the fake pitchcom issue and now you've got a really clever 2-strike pitch idea

Pitching to Mune would be really ballsy

just a game that looks like it will be decided by random variance. Cubs had some bad breaks on good contact against Castillo for a while. Now they get gifted the essential run. Manfred man is all about random events bringing the game to an end

Ultimately, a reasonably well-pitched inning by Hicks which is why they never got any runs that they truly earned. But hoo boy we can't let this thing go very long

Brutal. Two fake walks and a bloop

Grant Cleavinger has struck out 24 of the 33 batters he's faced as a professional. He's only walked 1. This guy was utterly useless as a college pitcher due to his poor control. What the heck did the Sox do with this kid?

The nice thing is it gives you some real room to stink without necessarily losing the lead.