Jake

Rule 5.09(a)(12). A batter is out when... An infielder intentionally drops a fair fly ball or line drive, with first, first and second, first and third, or first, second and third base occupied before two are out. The ball is dead and runner or runners shall return to their original base or bases.

Gordon getting fired up about a call that wasn't the call

I'm not all that worried about Schultz. He's had patches of issues with walks but he really hasn't been giving up much hard contact which I thought would be his weak point if he had one. I'm not projecting him into the hall of fame but this looks like a real major league pitcher to me. And he's not really pitching at what I've seen his best to be.

Point of emphasis this season for umpires is supposed to be not rewarding baserunners who try to initiate an obstruction call which to me the baserunner clearly did

With fair umpiring, the Mariners wouldn't have any runs.

That replay looks real bad for the umps to me

Ump can rule that if you're not making an earnest effort to catch it, then they can rule it like a catch so that you don't get an advantage from dropping on purpose. I think it's a poor application of that rule though because the ball was so close to the ground anyway.

Umps really getting involved in this game, eh

Welp, Woo is pretty good. At least it was another laborious inning.

I thought JRod was trying to bait him

While I don't really think Schultz is all that close to the level of Sale, he might have a little different results if he was making his MLB debut as a reliever (especially in the era when you could pull a guy in fewer than 3 batters if you wanted)

Sox (rightly, I think) see extension as an injury red flag so they probably wouldn't risk messing up his motion and possibly his health by pushing him for extension. Would probably move his release point closer to normal as well.

Romo does something weird with hands/arms before he throws it back to the pitcher. Hard for me to describe what's wrong with it. Reminds me kind of the stuff that guys with the yips do

Good call

I was waiting for that cutter the entire AB

Right now I think the righties are really locking in on the sinker/4-seam speed band. Noah will need to make them respect the offspeeds.

I've grown to accept that the goal of ABS isn't purely to make the calls perfect, but rather to add another skill that can differentiate the players and teams. I do wish there were one or two more challenges per team though so guys could let it rip more often.

Maybe if he had thrown it in the zone, Naylor would have hit it well enough to carry to an outfielder!

Romo was always scouted as a good defender, and both his throwing and framing are grading out fine, so I assume the issues with balls getting past him are probably not going to last. As far as decisionmaking with ABS challenges, that's a new thing for everyone but he's clearly not good at it yet.

Just keep filling up the zone

The cutter afterwards also barely nicked the zone.

Incredible swing from JRod, but the ump and Romo conspire to screw Noah on that one. Two pitches that ABS would have rung him up on.

I've been keeping close watch on the Statcast expected stats. Like nearly all players on Charlotte, his actual production is well ahead of what's expected. That said, he's tops in expected stats among the remaining players in Charlotte. Ranks 40th out of 338 full-time AAA players in xwOBA. So he's legitimately hitting well. His xwOBA is a notch higher than Tim Elko's was last year. So as I see it, Jacob has certainly hit some chipshots over the short porches in Charlotte, but he's also hitting the ball a ton better than he did last season and better than most AAA hitters. Whether he can keep that up or if it's somehow not able to be translated to better competition, I don't know. One thing he has over the Wilkins and Elko types is he's not that old and he doesn't have to hit that well to be a useful player since he's a middle infielder. Even better, a left-handed hitting one. Of course, for now the MLB club seems to have infielders in spades so IDK what you do with Jacob besides see if he keeps it up in Charlotte.

FWIW, Fisk was definitely a weight lifter in his Sox era...he credited heavy weightlifting with saving his career. He also gained about 30 pounds shortly after joining the Sox (although IIRC he did not attribute that to weight lifting and worried that he was getting fat). He was reputed to lift weights to exhaustion in a way few players those days were willing to do. I also remember a story that when Jeff Torborg banned alcohol from the clubhouse, he'd be sipping beers in the weight room in his postgame workouts.

Vahn Lackey vs. RPI Top 25: .186/.333/.326 in 12 games