Jake

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.

I think training staff has not much effect on player health (because they are all qualified and the biggest variable is the player himself)

Well safe to say Grant Taylor was indeed fooling Yelich

Grant gives up a lot of soft runs although the walk is his own fault

Is Quero dead?

Mune magic

Throwing whiffle balls out there

All I know about Ashby is these two games but his stuff looks nasty

Knocking out their starter in the 5th ain't the worst thing to happen. Can still see the vision here that the core is largely guys who take good ABs and therefore will tend to run up the pitch count.

A lot of folks were booking Chase a ticket to Charlotte