Balta1701

oooweee that was close.

Kris Bryant will be signing a contract worth something more than $70 million.

It's still the pirates.

Y'all wanted more defensive shifts!

haha that was a terrible looking swing. Get him the ball!

Plus, steroids won't be useful in baseball since they will hurt your reaction time.

Giolito last night On his 4 seam fastball and curveball that is his lowest spin game since April of 2019. On the slider he had one game in 2020 below that, but that is his second lowest spin game for the slider since April 2019. Earlier this year he had 2 games with a high spin rate on his changeup, including that marvelous start against the Angels opening day, as seen on this chart. But, starting in April of 2019, the spin rate on his change started dropping, so overall this looks like his 3rd highest changeup spin rate in a game since April, 2019.

Am I reading this right that Crochet gave up 4 hits in 10 pitches?

Well now without Engel, are you giving Gonzalez at bats over Vaughn?

He's been genuinely bad this year, but I said Heyward in early May as a guy the Cubs would almost certainly move if you took on some portion of his deal, and he will probably be better the rest of the way than he's been so far. Franky he'd probably be cheaper now.

Well, there's lots of reasons not to do that, but if taking on an overpaid and struggling outfielder from some team is too big of an investment, then they might as well.

Take on a bad contract.

Then the other option really is a white flag on the season, which a team with a decent lead in the division shouldn't do. This kind of gaping hole, where you're playing true AA and AAA players in several positions, will eventually cost the white sox the division if they don't at least plug it partially.

They said at the update in early May that he would be shut down from all baseball activities until June. His rehab stint started on about May 22, so it was pretty clear they were gambling by pushing him.

They should have sucked it up and brought in someone from outside back in early May. Then they would at least have had another warm body so as to not rush Engel so much.

They have 2 games against the Pirates. This should be a good start.

The lost players have been slightly more impactful for the White Sox, but the Astros have had 60% more games spent on the IL by players than the White Sox. The White Sox have had 471 man-games spent on the IL, the Padres have had 1106. https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/disabled-list/cumulative-team/

With Lynn in particular, he had never gotten Cy Young votes until 2019 when he suddenly finished 5th in the AL. He had previously been an all star once, in 2012, and he was particularly bad with the Twins in 2018. So while I can't verify that this was the cause...whatever he did in 2019 took him from being a good pitcher with an injury in 2016 and a really bad first run in the AL in 2018 to a clearly elite pitcher in 2019. Also, FWIW, his K/BB rate did its first spike when he was traded to the Yankees in mid-2018, so decent chance that's where this started for him, whatever it was.

He's actually never been at 2400 before this year, on average, because that's right in the middle of what he has come out as. He was at 2300 in 2017-2018, 2450 to 2500 in 2019-2020, and was at 2500 earlier this season before dropping down now. There's a now reasonably supported hypothesis that 2300 is his "clean grip spin rate on his fastball" and 2500 is whatever he was using, and for him that's the difference between an ERA of ~4 and an ERA of 3.25. He has a good arm, he's probably not going to fall completely off the face of the earth without the stuff, but this is the first solid explanation I've gotten for how he cut his walk rate 20% and raised his K rate 20% starting in 2019 compared to his career numbers. In the offseason we were just saying some vague version of "he changed what he's doing".

FWIW, there was nothing unusual about the spin on on Rodon's pitches in his recent starts compared to the rest of the year.

Bauer’s spin in his first game without the stuff, specifically on his fastball, dropped 223 rpm. Lynn’s is down just over 200 on his fastball. Bauer’s has a higher overall spin and throws more offspeed stuff, but on the fastball, their drops are very similar. https://www.truebluela.com/2021/6/6/22521637/trevor-bauer-spin-rate-mlb-baseball-foreign-substances-enforcement-dodgers-dave-roberts

Does the pitch matter? Lynn’s curveball went from 2200 rpm in 2018 to 2600 rpm in 2020.

We have a thread titled “sticky substances” on this forum page, for now I think that’s a fair spot for this comment.

A rule from about 15 years ago - if baseball didn’t want this question asked they should have kept things clean. A guy struggling with his command because he couldn’t grip the ball like he used to a couple weeks ago…maybe?