then coronavirus happened, 2020 baseball

chisox hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs against cardinals reliever roel ramirez, making his big league debut. schildt just make the pitching change.

honestly, i follow the cardinals prospects pretty closely, and i had never heard of ramirez before today. he's only thrown 3 innings above AA ball, before today. he's 25. i feel bad for him.

encarnacion has a chance to make history (by hitting the 5th in a row - the record is 4, which i think has happened 3 times before today)

...encarnacion strikes out

probably doesn't matter if the season's getting cancelled or whatever, but the baseballs they've used this year seem to be less juiced than last year, at least going by league HR/FB. down to '16/'18 levels. they might just be using the '18 batch again like they did in the postseason last year.

maybe a small sample size so far but considering 1. games are starting in the middle of july when home runs should be peaking, none of that cold april weather lowering the number 2. NL adding the DH should hypothetically make a small difference at least

this is the only thing i care about anymore

― ℺ ☽ ⋠ ⏎ (✖), Monday, July 27, 2020 1:04 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

kidding HR rate has spiked to 2019 levels

only one way to win

wow, didn't know the rockies owner was such a fucking dick

This is a very bad look for the Rockies https://t.co/3emJxhLvzu pic.twitter.com/2QKuj9PJ09

— Future Dodgers (@FutureDodgers) August 17, 2020

i mean, he's literally a dick, i guess

every other owner agrees with his point but is better at cost/benefit analyses

Jeff Passan of ESPN writes that Mike Clevinger would fall one day short of reaching four years of service time in the Indians keep him optioned at their alternate training site for 20 days.

This would delay his free agency by one year. It would be a quite the punishment for Clevinger, who initially misled his teammates about going out in Chicago on August 7. He actually boarded the team plane before the truth emerged. The Indians sit at 13-9 on the year, one game behind the Twins for first place in the AL Central. With expanded playoffs and the quality starting pitching they have, there's a real chance they could make a run this year. However, it's hard to imagine them getting there without Clevinger. It's going to be fascinating to see how this plays out and if this situation is even salvageable. Stay tuned.

I read the Indians team meeting over that one was pretty intense, with one of the vets threatening to sit out the season if they kept those two idiots on the squad.

Trevor Gott, the current closer for the SF Giants, has allowed 6 (six!) 9th inning homeruns in 7 innings of work this season across 9 appearances. His ERA is 14.73 and WHIP is 2.05.

Kapler claims to have faith in him even though he's had 3 straight nuclear meltdowns.

usta look fwd to the old pitcher Jim Gott facing Tim Teufel

oh, the profanity

https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2020/08/17/ron-gardenhire-don-mattingly-manager-ejections-video

"horsefuckingSHIT"

Skubal and Mize making consecutive debuts for the Tigers. Should probably start a team thread, eh?. Eh...

jim edmonds has no idea what the word "leverage" means, dislikes the term "high leverage", thinks it should be "high stress" situation instead for relievers. mentions that "leverage" doesn't make sense, "unless you're talking about sticking a piece of wood in a crack to lift up something", then says "just saying" after 5 seconds of dead air time

*googles Edmonds' "clutch" stats*

i also don't think people should use the word leverage unless they're talking about the tv series starring timothy hutton

-2.15 career

only 6 out of 18 seasons registered positive.

Although it should be noted that in the 2004 NLCS he both hit a walk-off grand slam AND made a game-saving catch in games 6 and 7.

i don't know, according to fangraphs edmonds' career splits across 290 "High Leverage" plate appearances was .276/.399/.528, 133 wRC+

huh, I used their "Clutch" metric:

https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/clutch/

Clutch measures how well a player performed in high leverage situations. It’s calculated as such:

Clutch = (WPA / pLI) – WPA/LI

In the words of David Appelman, this calculation measures, “…how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.” It also compares a player against himself, so a player who hits .300 in high leverage situations when he’s an overall .300 hitter is not considered clutch.

Opening day starter Jack Flaherty is scheduled to have his 2nd start tomorrow, 26 days later due to scheduling postponements.

how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.

i'm not super-familiar with the clutch metric, but i think an overall career score close to zero is actually pretty good. it's an index, i think, with 0 set as the baseline. a score close to zero means that they performed just as well in high-leverage situations as they did in medium and low-leverage situations. and if they performed pretty well overall (like edmonds), that also means they performed pretty well in high leverage situations.

or at least, that's how i understand it

or really, i guess this explains the same thing, more concisely:

"It also compares a player against himself, so a player who hits .300 in high leverage situations when he’s an overall .300 hitter is not considered clutch."

so if i understand that correctly, a pete kozma level player (a goddamn LEGEND, is what i'm saying) could hit .300 in high leverage situations and have a very high "Clutch" score, because it would be comparing it to pete kozma in normal situations (a goddamn legend). but someone like juan soto could hit .300 in high leverage situations and have a negative Clutch, because it would be compared to his high-level baseline hitting

i think it's better just to look at their stats in high leverage situations and then consider the rest of the context manually

I interpreted it as Edmonds was a slightly worse (-2 uh... % or some fraction of their index) clutch/high-leverage performer than in his context-neutral ABs...

right, but by itself, that doesn't tell you anything about how good the context-neutral ABs are. it just tells you that he was pretty much just as good in high-leverage as other situations. tony gwynn is the all-time leader in Clutch; he had 12 seasons of positive clutch, 8 of negative. daniel descalso is the #6 Clutch hitter of all time

er...i'm not making any sense, and i understand that you get it, sorry!

clutch/high-leverage seems like a baloney stat in the first place though

but not for the reasons that jim edmonds asserted this evening, lol

Opening day starter Jack Flaherty is scheduled to have his 2nd start tomorrow, 26 days later due to scheduling postponements.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, August 18, 2020 9:50 PM (yesterday)

1.2 IP, 40 pitches... just... lol, did he get hurt? are they babying because of his lack of workload? What a weird season.

also MLB debut tonight for barves 21yo cristian pache: adequate hitter, supposed to be an absolutely incredible andruw-level outfielder

i swear to god the problems with baseball would all be solved by

1) reducing time between innings i.e. fewer commercials

2) pushing all the fences back 100 feet

the first is politically impossible, the second physically impossible. though i do see this proposal written up: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/12200989/new-mlb-proposal-shorten-breaks-innings

did that ever happen?

they just need to put in the damn pitch clock. they've been using it in every minor-league game for like 5 or 6 years now, it works great

yes that too! okay 3. three things.

you know what i would like to see, as an all-star game style novelty event? Pitcher Showdowns. i'm directly ripping this off from the video game MLB The Show 2020, btw.

it works like this. it's just one elite pitcher (let's say gerrit cole) vs the batters of another team. there are no innings. instead, the batters try to score a certain number of runs (say, 3) before making 15 outs. it's very simple but it's actually pretty intense! a pitcher can go on a strong run and just mow through the outs without letting anyone on base, and it's a cool way to give attention to certain pitchers. but when the target number of runs is only 3, you're always a couple baserunners and a home run away from winning, so it remains compelling all the way to the end, even when the pitcher dominates.

also creates lol situations like there runners on 2nd and 3rd for 9 outs in a row, just stranded by poor hitting

typos galore. anyway, know what game i want to play right now? mlb the show 2020

you have just described cricket.

one 'inning' = getting every opposing batter out.

and the batter keeps batting until you get him out. you'll have dudes knock in like 30 runs before they get sat down. (the balance between offense and defense is.... a bit fucked)

johan oviedo starts game 2 of the cards/cubs double-header, making his debut. he will be the 11th cardinal player to make their debut since they started playing again

Longtime Cincinnati Reds announcer Thom Brennaman was caught on a hot mic saying “one of the fag capitals of the world.” He is currently announcing the second game of the Reds’ doubleheader against Kansas City. pic.twitter.com/Uwz07eRIKv

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) August 20, 2020

eww, wtf

that's a strike against the production crew, too. there are a bunch of people who can hear them when they talk between innings (the director, the producer, the audio team, etc). they must all be cool with it, or at least not be willing to say anything.

Schott Award 2020

He was referring to Kansas City?

What a shitheel, insane that it's all unfolding live on air. He apologized and handed his headset over to another broadcaster.

"I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith. I don't know if I'm going to be putting on this headset again. I am very, very sorry. I beg for your forgiveness."

not actually smarter than marty, then

there's a particular vitriol in his voice when he says it, in the clip, that is really ugly

"I am very, very sorry [to have been caught]."