Jake

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.

Sox will be in 4th place by Tuesday

Well what I'm saying is everything goes according to plan. The ump was trying to tell the boys to swing at that s%*#

The pitch Miguel hit out was 4.7" above the zone

Holy s%*# how did he get to that

The only other plausibly available relievers I think are Hicks and Fedde. And I think Hicks may not really be available.

So when MLB grades umpires, they basically forgive any miss that is with .75" of being correct. By that standard, home plate ump is at about 94% correct today. Average full-time ump is 96.8%, so certainly a below average game. If you give no margin for error, he's at 90.1% relative to 93.5% average. Bad game although it looks like he's been somewhat victimized by having to make a lot of relatively close calls. And it looks a little worse because his misses aren't that predictable.

I think he's one of those guys who turned his career around by just aiming middle and seeing what happens (as opposed to walking everybody)

Entering today, had allowed 3 runs in 6.1 IP, allowing 6 hits and 1 BB. 1 of those runs was on a cheapie over the monster. The previous outing in Detroit they were squaring him up but I thought Will should have pulled him after his first inning.

This is pretty much what I'd expect a tough outing for Brazoban to look like. He's gonna fill up the zone and sometimes they'll hit it

As bad outings go, I've seen a lot worse.

uh oh Sean, if your next pitch misses way in then you'll be charged with murder

Chris Getz apology thread

I'm not bringing any data here so I might be completely wrong, but I feel like when Colson is going good he pretty regularly would have those head-scratching takes of strike three. I remember thinking it was a side effect of him trying not to cover every single pitch, which was the thing that always got him in trouble.

Back in my day, every pitcher strived to hit the low outside corner to a righty with their fastball. That was the default spot, the one you felt like you should be able to hit with your eyes closed. That particular pitch is going extinct. I think the new generic spot is up and in to a righty (up and away to a lefty). Unfortunately for Colson that's the no-hit zone for him, although he's hardly alone and that's part of the reason every pitcher is trying to calibrate everything to hit the top of the zone reliably.

One of the ironies with ABS is if the ump is having a bad game, you're more likely to run out of challenges and be victimized further.

I wonder if the ump heard anyone shouting out to challenge, that would be grounds to not grant one if he feels the batter received an instruction regardless of timing

Burke not losing velo as the game goes on. I think those two weirdly slow fastballs are probably not fastballs although I'm not sure what they were supposed to be from looking at their pitch shapes.