chw42

They tried so hard to give this one away. I know Vucevic is sick and probably should not have played tonight, but my god he was awful in the last few minutes of the game. Toronto exploited his inability to defend and I'm not sure what Lonzo was doing on some of those inbound passes. This is a game they lose last year cause they definitely would have lost without DeRozan hitting some tough shots when nobody else could get anything to fall. The real schedule starts this weekend. I'll reserve my optimism until I see how they play against better competition.

Yeah those spin rate increases do seem a bit sus. His fastball velocity did go up 3 MPH compared to his average. The extra velocity alone could be responsible for some of the spin increase (up 80 RPM vs. his yearly average). His velocity and spin rates were down by a ton in his first start and they said he had some knee issues (not sure if that's legit or not, they could have just been buying time to warm someone else up). But the fact that he never went to the rosin bag and kept going to his hair does seem suspect as well. Before we yell the Astros are cheating, Cease goes to his hair after almost every pitch. He actually does use rosin though, so it could be just rosin + sweat. That's why I the bit about Garcia never going to the rosin bag was interesting to me.

Seriously, he looks slow for someone who ran a 4.4.

Dodgers were clearly not as good offensively without Muncy. Losing Kershaw hurt because it forced them to start guys like Scherzer and Buehler on short rest. Roberts also kept using Urias and Scherzer as relievers and that made the problem even worse.

Zach having a bad shooting night and they're up 25 after 3. I think that might be one of the biggest differences with the team this year. There's so many good scoring options that if LaVine has a bad night, DeRozan, Vooch, and Lonzo can pick him up.

Lonzo and Caruso are so pesky on defense. Bulls are getting tons of turnovers.

Altuve's been making errors left and right but looked like a 5x gold glove winner against us.

Of course he gets hurt after he gave up 1 run in almost 11 innings against us.

Well that's even worse.

He's already 23 too, so if he has an .813 OPS between A ball and AA (where he hit for no power), I'm not sure his ceiling at the ML level is going to be all that high.

Yes DRS does account for shifting, which actually means that the team being worse defensively is not only because of the lack of shifting.

His numbers with RISP are actually better than his career slash line. It may be easy to remember somebody not coming through in certain big situations, but that doesn't mean they straight up suck when guys are on base.

He's worse than Madrigal. I don't think Nick would ever hit .260 with a .290 OBP.

Yeah the lack of shifting this year became very evident against the Astros. How many up the middle ground ball hits did we give up to left handed hitters in this series alone? It had to be close to 5 and a lot of those came in big situations.

I think what people might not have taken into account when looking at this matchup is just how good the Astros hitters are in the postseason. Even when they were absolutely garbage last year in the regular season, they turned it on in the postseason and took the Rays to game 7 in the ALCS after being down 3-0. Correa, Altuve, and Bregman in particular have all been there and had massive success in October and they were all instrumental to the Astros winning this series. Tucker was also their best hitter in the regular season and he was hitting 6th or 7th when he probably should have hit 2nd in the order.

Just to note, the Sox were top 10 in defensive value last season under Renteria. We basically had the same position players this year and ended up 17th. Could some of that be missing Robert for half the season? Maybe, but we also didn't have Eloy in LF for 100 games. Also, a lot of the negative value on defense came from Zack Collins being the worst framer in baseball. That being said, UZR does not take defensive shits into account and the Sox went from being middle of the pack in shifting last year to being in the bottom 5 this year. The Sox also went from being 2nd in DRS last year to 26th this year. I do wonder how much of this variance is due to the 60 game season last year though. Even last season, I don't think I ever considered the Sox to be a good defensive team outside of Luis Robert making some crazy catches in center.

So we'd be replacing Madrigal with a much worse version of Madrigal? Fletcher basically didn't do jack shit the entire 2nd half. Every time I watched him play, he would ground into a double play.

Scherzer might actually be possible since JR refuses to give pitchers long deals. Him being 37 probably means no team will give him more than 3 years. He'll probably get almost $100 million for those 3 years though.

Well then he'll fit right in with this outfield. His statcast numbers were pretty solid this year so he is a strong bounceback candidate.

Atlanta was probably a lot better than their record since their run differential was actually really good. They were probably more like a 95 win team than an 88 win team. Their pitching got hot at the right time late in the season and their deadline moves actually worked out. They did all of this without Ronald Acuna.

The Brewers also didn't really have any competition for the division in the entire 2nd half of the season, much like the Sox.

The fact that Leury Garcia had more XBH than the core 6 is telling.

What's funny is they threw him all sliders the AB before.

I think the only XBH from a RH all series was from Andrew Vaughn of all people.

JR should see the tide turning in the city. Cubs are gonna be ass for a few years and the Sox are gonna be the best team in the city. Unless COVID somehow gets worse, attendance will go up next year. The payroll needs to increase accordingly. If we go into next season with more or less the same team, it's not gonna work. We'll be sitting here in the same spot next October.