Balta1701

Almost certainly another case of poor statistics and poor methods used to generate headlines. https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/sturgis-rally-covid19-explosion-paper.html

Having seen him this year, it doesn't seem like he's being subtle as much as he is losing focus. He has rashes of passed balls not because he's being subtle but because he lost focus for that game for whatever reason. He let the ball get away from him on Tuesday to end the game not because he was being subtle but because he wasn't focused on the game. It seems like just a lot of mental mistakes for him, but they become really big and important to the results sometimes.

What a beautiful at bat.

"Being President Doesn't Change Who You Are, It Reveals Who You Are." -Michelle Obama.

If the deadlines are as normal, my prediction is still that most of the free agent market is going to take until January or February to develop, if it develops at all. If there are multiple vaccine setbacks that even just delay things by a month or two, baseball could be looking at no fans or drastic fan limits to start the year and little to no new information by Feb. 1. Even if things go well, a lot of guys will be sitting there until February not knowing if they're even going to get minimal contract offers next year. If McCann doesn't get a 3/$40 offer immediately, like by Thanksgiving, and he gets a QO, he'd have to be crazy to pass that up with where we are now.

Yes, the White Sox could offer McCann a QO this offseason, that would be the equivalent of offering him a 1 year contract worth over $18 million. There is a decent chance he would accept that, particularly given the COVID mess destroying the revenues for so many teams, at which point the White Sox would have what, $35 million tied up in their catcher's spot next year?

Bob Woodward is horrible.

Obviously the answer is a time machine to avoid signing Grandal and instead signing a 2-3 year McCann extension. But alas that ship has sailed. Trading Grandal would only be an option if the White Sox ate a portion of the contract, which they don’t normally do but especially won’t do given COVID revenue losses. So the answer is let McCann walk, hope Grandal doesn’t get benched in the playoffs again.

Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine study paused after unexplained illness in one participant. Required to investigate if vaccine had led to the disease or if it’s a random occurrence. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/08/910863680/covid-19-vaccine-trial-paused-due-to-illness-in-one-volunteer

It's only a matter of time until some of these kids die. 1900 people in like 3 weeks. How on Earth do they think they're going to avoid lawsuits over this? McConnell?

Apparently it came out today that a lot of the tech stock surge has been driven by one Japanese company hedge fund that took out huge leveraged bets on a set of tech companies and the rest of the market followed until yesterday

There’s a decent chance that he’s still unconscious after being struck by the shock wave from Roberts HR last night.

But even given that, would you be willing to offer him $6 million next year? Because his salary this year is $5.6 million, and offering him arbitration would give him likely a small raise. More likely, you non-tender him, and he signs somewhere on a 1 year, $2-3 million deal with incentives, to see if it was the virus that knocked out his power and another year brings him back. Maybe less if teams are expecting attendance limits next year.

"please do not approach your neighbor's house for candy during a pandemic without appropriate safety gear. Thank you for your time."

Maybe if this happens 3 years in a row. If this year and in 2021 and in 2022 we're out in the first round, that might make them say "Hey something's amiss here".

The problem with getting players who are "Better than we have but not top 5 level" is that when we've gotten those players, they have had an extremely high failure rate for us, and everyone else. They've been the ones who have dropped off partially to a ton, leaving us hanging. They're the Samardzija, Frazier, LaRoche, Encarnacion guys. So in the back of our heads, we're saying "Yes Joc has had a 130 wRC+ against righties in his career and we need that...but a tiny dropoff in that platoon split and suddenly we've got another flop". It's also...not wrong. Back when we were spending money, 2015-2017, I went through the guys you might consider "mid-level" free agents, the guys making $10-20 mil a year, and found that consistently the "bust rate" in them of guys where you want out of that contract was like 70%. It improved the last couple years as the FA market stalled, but in general those are just bad signings. You convince yourself the player has been consistent for x number of years and then you wind up having them take an immediate step backwards once they get to you, and it happens over and over. Your 2015 team signs 4 of them, Robertson performs well, but then you're asking how your other 3 big acquisitions all disappointed - those are normal numbers for these guys. Sometimes you have to do that, if we have money to spend this offseason Joc makes sense, but gosh darnit it would be so nice to try out one of the kids in that spot.

I believe the Brewers would/should say no to that.

Back before the season, somewhere I have a post saying that my prediction this year would be that the statement "White Sox rookies always struggle" would have to be amended with the phrase "Except Luis Robert" for the next howevermany years. There's some level of skill at this game where a guy is just ready. Juan Soto, Luis Robert, they come up and they're just that good.

Vin Scully joined Twitter this week. Here he is reminiscing about a ridiculous curveball that Kershaw threw in ST 2008. Somewhere we had a post or a thread on that pitch.

I'm more worried that this is indicating an underlying cardiac issue.

If a person's heart was mildly damaged in a way that wouldn't be noticed without the most sensitive test possible, is there any way that could manifest, in an athlete, as soreness in the legs? (maybe triggered by more limited bloodflow than they're used to?)

I think it's extremely likely that the FA market waits until the last minute to develop. Whether or not players can be afforded depends entirely on whether or not ballparks can be opened, and that depends on whether or not there's a working vaccine, and that depends on whether or not the population is willing to get it (now that they're openly pushing releasing it without completing safety tests even I'm hesitant). We won't know the answers to all those in early November. We might not even know the answers to those questions in January.

Even teams that are drafting really well wind up having some random positions they can’t fill. In the last 2 years the Dodgers have signed pollock and traded for and signed Betts. The Astros traded for their top 3 pitchers of the last 3 seasons.