caulfield12

Anderson slashed an oppo double down the line...some life finally.

Or bueno. Mal. Terible. Horible.

Barely got him for the 3rd out...race to the bag. Maybe it's a good thing they didn't extend Giolito because he will undoubtedly be easier to trade.

Good throw would have had him at second. Angels just mashing the supposedly dead baseball.

Patriots' Day Massacre 2.

Might be high scoring on part of LAA. Ward has been on an unreal tear as of late, almost Trout-like.

That was quick.

Meanwhile, Trayce Thompson is starting tonight for a team at six games over .500. Matt Beaty on the other corner. One of the many targets on the Dodgers in the Kimbrel deal. (Of course, only hitting .091). Six at .210 or under.

Touche. You can look at exceptions to the rule but that doesn't make them winning bets from a probability standpoint.

Which means with the White Sox basically at par with Detroit and Minnesota in attendance those two teams have a significant advantage at the midseason TDL with better farm systems and significantly more financial flexibility.

Sure, the 2005 White Sox prove that point as well. But there's at least a 75-80% correlation with Top 10-12 payrolls and making it to the postseason. The exceptions are only the A's, Rays, Brewers and Sox/Braves in recent years. Of course, you also have to factor in expanded playoffs, with 40-45% of teams making it two years ago, like the Marlins.

All comes down to the managers then. Uh-oh. Maddon is not the Gandhi as Cubs fans believed, but he's at the very least competent and still relatively innovative. It's not like Ross came right in and led those veterans to the playoffs in their final opportunity.

Yes and they without 2/3 best hitters in Acuna and Ozuna. Well, we can keep repeating these exceptional cases or stare reality in the face based on the eye test, bad body language other than Vaughn and Harrison. Then there's the painful experience of taking in a typical TLR postmortem where you can see he's clearly struggling with his once sharper mental acuity...

PITCH ARSENAL Coming out of the bullpen, Herget is a five-pitch pitcher that can spray the ball across the strike zone with vertical and horizontal movement. His Curveball (25.1%), 4-Seam Fastball (24.7%), Sinker (24.7%), and Slider (23.1%) are evenly used with a Changeup filtered in just 2.3% of the time. As his velocity sits between 73-92 MPH, his best pitch based on tracking data is his Curveball. Opposing batters hit for a sub-two average (.190), a .333 Slugging Percentage and an exceptionally high Whiff rate of 51.4%. Even though his velocity does not light up the radar gun, Herget has the ability to blow a fastball by any batter especially as he feeds them a steady diet of offspeed pitches. Amongst qualified pitchers, Herget’s horizontal movement of his 4-Seam Fastball (16.6 in) would rank third in Major League Baseball behind Joe Smith (16.7) and Tim Hill (18.9). Herget worked best against left-handed batters in 2021, working a .211 average with only four hits and eight strikeouts. Basically effective softer tossing 6th or 7th inning guy with a starter's arsenal. Deceptive fastball at 91-93. https://www.halosheaven.com/2022/1/11/22877905/los-angeles-angels-player-review-jimmy-herget

Then you would pay him about $5-6 million.

Who was it arguing he was going to be up last week or no later than this weekend?

Trout has like double the OPS of anyone else on the roster and leads the majors again. Don't let him, Rendon or Ohtani beat you. So it will doubtless be Ward Adell Walsh that do the damage.

Try $175...at least go by the same payroll numbers that everyone else uses. But you're making a great argument for poor allocation of resources. The Twins and Tigers at $135 million, and they collectively added 3 $100+ million contract guys in Baez, Buxton and Correa. The Twins also added Ryan, Bundy, Archer, Gray and Paddack to their rotation whereas we were only able to scrounge up 9.70 ERA in his last ten starts VV. The Indians even swept us with half our payroll. And signed the biggest get of all in Jose Ramirez.

Or Escobar. Or Wendle. Or Taylor.

What was it last year out of the pen? Had to be at nearly twice as many sliders… Swing and miss percentage on both pitches?

Isolate August 2005 until he got injured in May in Cincinnati the following year. That’s the specific stretch. Nobody in the world would claim Buehrle or Garland were ever the best in the entire sport during a four month timespan including the postseason. And yes he did take the only lost that October in a very close game against Paul Byrd of all people.

If a HoF manager doesn’t have the cojones to pull him against his wishes, who does?

This does sound like the 2016 predicament in a way, except that team got out of the gate and played way over their heads and everyone knew 23-10 was a mirage. Or you can simply go along with the .500ish team narrative that has been established over the last ninety or so games (and not the red hot May/June 2021 Sox team that made us a Top Five favorite entering the season). At roughly the 40 game mark in 2016 we decided to start looking for a “big game” pitcher to swing the odds back on our favor somehow…let’s try not to do something foolhardy like that again, Hahn.

You can never get on a consistent roll with Keuchel and VV in the rotation…that much is patently obvious. You start two games out of five with only 25-30% odds of winning out of the gate. That’s not easy to overcome with this current offense. Expecting Cueto to be April/May 2016 Matt Latos is being pretty optimistic, too.

“Paddack has looked OK so far, but as teams see him multiple times the 2 pitch mix is going to hurt him.” My argument is that this is exactly what Kopech is, at least right now. There are some pitchers that can get away with that mix…05-06 Jose Contreras threw just two pitches 90% of the time and was the best pitcher in baseball during that stretch. Let’s see how Kopech does against really good offenses outside the AL Central.