caulfield12

The trend in the minors though is back towards more steals...the new Moneyball niche, playing like 2014-15 Royals on offense, manufacturing runs unless you have big bopper sluggers on your roster.

BDacks on a 5-27 slide, haven't won on the road in ages. 15-13 to 20-40.

Some overly sensitive people these days are even triggered by the word triggered...but maybe getting rid of the smiling/laugh emoji would help at least somewhat? Probably not easy to do as it sounds. Then some will be upset they can't mock others, I suppose.

Yeah, but he was piling them up at a faster pace. 5D Chess, right there. He wouldn't have been a joy to be around in high school debate or Model UN, on the other hand. Reminds me of one of the stars of the documentary Boys State.

So if you're not banned you still feel compelled to come here and post? I've never seen SoxTalk referred to essentially in terms of being a reckless addiction, lol. Almost a compliment.

Juggernaut though? Not without Jimenez, Robert, Giolito (the ace version), another outfielder and a veteran RH bridge reliever to get the game to Hendricks. And quite possibly not with this manager, either. Wiping out other teams would be disrespectful to the game.

Sheets back to Charlotte, 0 for 2 tonight so far. Burger 1/2 with an RBI. Stiever 6/3/0/0/4.

He might not even have played in any minor league games by then, and Robert/Jimenez will be nearing returns. Something will have to go (even more) terribly wrong to see Cespedes at the big league level this year.

Everyone should act like Paul O'Neill and George Brett if they really care about the game.

Goodbye any chance of keeping Giolito around longer than 2023.

Alexei Ramirez can coach them up, that oughta do the trick! Haha...

That will definitely shorten games. Not.

10.05 ERA. Guess Holland was marginally better when he pitched for the White Sox, but TLR must have been confused with the multiple World Series version of the guy in his prime with the Rangers to take that particular approach....

Definitely NOT more sacrifice bunting to keep games (especially at home) closer than they need to be.

Giolito not pitching like an ace and being loose with the change-up doesn’t help. We knew coming into today that Schoop and Haase were their hot hitters. Plus, Skubal has good raw stuff, but Sox hitters also 50% responsible for getting themselves out...well, in addition to the sac bunting.

I guess TLR can more conveniently be blamed...

https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance 11,078 average after today, good for 14th...Cubs at 12,924 over one more game in comparison.

7-1 Indians now...

Because of last year...

Giolito and Rodon recently have really gotten hurt with their changeups...

Indians up 3-1 on Means, still hitting behind Cy Civale. Yay, Leury might not be available for the ninth due to getting banged up diving into home late yesterday. 99 mph from Ruiz. Yermin holding his own and giving some good targets.

Mendick also broke the wrong way defensively earlier in the game...looks increasingly like he’s the odd man out.

But this gets to something I’ve been stewing on for years, and wrote an article at BP about. Why is spin rate so important to pitchers? In Sawchick’s article, he says, “More spin means more Magnus effect, which is the invisible force governing most pitch movement.” But this isn’t quite right: active spin can lead to movement, but you can boost your spin rate by cutting the ball, which is how Garrett Richards can have one of the spinniest fastballs in the game, but well *below* average movement. If the idea is that spin is the raw material for Magnus-based movement, why not just measure – and stay with me here – Magnus-based movement? Given its correlation with velocity (more velo, more spin), it’s even harder to isolate the value that it can add absent a whole bunch of caveats. This is why Marcus Stroman can be effective despite a sinker with above-average spin but below-average spin efficiency, for example. I looked at Kendall Graveman’s spin rate, partially out of curiosity and partly to see if his turbo-sinker was as high-spin as it looks. The answer: no, it’s not. Graveman’s sinker gets only average spin, and thus below-average Bauer units given its high velocity. And what’s more, that spin rate has gone *down* – and markedly – in recent years. I went and looked at perhaps the most famous turbo-sinker in the game, Blake Treinen’s, and the same pattern held: he had pretty good spin rates in his 2018 Oakland peak, but it’s dropped off in each year since, and is now in a statistical dead heat with Marco Gonzales’ non-turbo-sinker. In spin efficiency and Bauer units, Gonzales “beats” both Treinen and Graveman’s pitches handily. But, and I know this is a stat-focused blog, just *watch the pitches.* Some of this has to do with the seam-shifted wake, the fact that another force can cause a pitch to move than just the Magnus effect. This seems particularly true for Stroman, for example, and may also be at play with Justus Sheffield, the M’s starter tonight. But whatever the reason, it’s not simply the case that spin leads directly to movement, and it’s not the case that spin (in and of itself) leads to effectiveness. Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff, or Bauer himself and Yu Darvish, have been very successful and create tons of spin. But they all throw really, really hard. Bauer gets a ton of movement, while Woodruff doesn’t. And pitchers like Jack Flaherty, Shane Bieber, and Blake Treinen can be successful despite average fastball spin. Still, tell that to the pitchers. This season’s seen a ton of talk about cracking down on foreign substances. Mike Schildt’s press convo after his pitcher had his hat confiscated was the most famous example, but there’s constant chatter about the league taking balls to sample. Today’s word that they may begin, uh, doing something with all the evidence they presumably have plays into it. It seems that pitchers have seen what’s happened to Bauer and Cole’s spin rates over the years, and are trying new things to increase their grip on the ball. If a non-athlete reporter like Sawchick could add 400 rpms by using something, hey, what could they add? I’m sure a lot of pitchers are using stuff, but I keep thinking that if some of these new substances were that transformative, we’d see it in league-wide spin rates and movement patterns in a magnitude that would jump off the page. We DO see spin rate inching up, but then, so is velo. Movement’s up too, but as Rob Arthur mentioned, much of that could be due to the baseball being lighter. Marc W. http://www.ussmariner.com

Down to .101, yikes. Surely they won’t allow him to fall much further? 8 for 81= .099

17th out of 38 MLB second basemen with 120+ plate appearances in terms of fWAR. So above average, by definition. If we change it to 100+ PA at second, 17/47, or roughly top third in MLB for his position. Semien, Altuve, Merrifield, Polanco, Solak, Lowe in AL lead him. Wong, now, injured, 7th. Pretty decent company to be right there with those last 3-4 names as a rookie.