Jake

I should say I might be generous in calling the velo drop "slight" depending on where you want to say the baseline should be. I took his first start sitting 96-97 as maybe higher than his healthy normal, but maybe that's not true.

My best guess is Hagen's slight drop in velo has to do with him trying to aim it better, but he did have a brief scare with the arm/elbow last season as I recall.

Great looking pitch chart for Hagen in the first 🤮

Well I'm certainly giving him time. But the K rate is up nearly 50% so as I see it, it's currently at a rate that you can't safely promote him. Just for reference, Joey Gallo struck out less than this in high-A as a 20 year old. So I want to see Caleb show some real mastery of this low level of pitching so he doesn't risk getting overwhelmed later.

Quero entered the night grading out as the worst challenger by a large margin but maybe these nudge him towards respectability

Last I looked, Seranthony had the highest leverage appearances of anybody in MLB. I suspect that went up even further tonight.

Quero making good use of the challenges this inning

Reliever uses a full windup with nobody on and suddenly he can't find his release out of the stretch. No surprise there

Lurch with the unhittable middle-middle low 90s 4 seamers!

Gordon, there are no horses. This is all we got!

Couple righties have had absolutely no chance to hit Sean's heater today. Like he's tipping his pitches except he stopped doing it so they keep getting surprised that it's a fastball

Getting to be a bit too curveball heavy I think

He finally made contact with a high pitch at the worst time 😭

My personal O/U is around 70 wins. But the team is increasingly fun, for the moment. Another injury or underperformance could definitely suck the air out of the balloon, though. Not a lot of depth at all.

Confessional: I'm not really sold on Bonemer. Statistically, K rate is concerning. Aesthetically, swing looks stiff. I realize I am saying these things about a player with a 1.100 OPS or thereabouts while young for his level.

Differences between Schultz/McDougal examples and Mune is that Mune is actually Japanese and that Japan generally embraces samurai as a positive representation of their culture (and especially relevant to competitive sports). Better analogy would be something like an American player having a cowboy nickname or something like that. I think Randy Bass got branded as a Colonel Sanders lookalike in NPB, lol

Oppor is cooked

Clutch Colson!!! Small sample sizes rule everything around me!!

Is there some kind of narrative/explanation for why Kelenic posted a sub-.600 OPS in AAA last season? He had hit well at that level before.

There's my power hitter

Lucky Kelenic didn't pick up an interference

Ump immediately looks to see if he can take it away from Peters lol

Lowe running like it hurts out there in left

Fantastic defense for all involved there.

Just setting up the Kelenic hero game