general 2021 MLB discussion thread

morbs was willing to overlook it

but yeah the cubs seem to be getting to 85% by cutting/trading away vaxxholes like arrieta and rizzo

ps i have never seen 'field of dreams' and also fuck this entire exercise

I loved it lol

I was going to put that game on the bar TVs, but our local cable co. had let its contract with the Fox affiliate expire and was running Newsmax on that channel. Fortunately the Little League World Series regionals were on.

I assumed it was over because pf the angels on MLB channel but whatever field of dreams is good

i am surrounded by corny indie fucs!

Wait I thought the indie stance would be anti field o dreams

looked like a crazy game, would have been a good one to watch.

Field of Dreams: book good, movie bad

I think this is the official corny indie stance

yankees lost, so i am now okay with it

sheehan

What made last night’s game great wasn’t Kevin Costner or the corn stalks or the emotional manipulation. What made it great was Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton and Eloy Jimenez and Jose Abreu and, oh man, Tim Anderson. What made it great was Michael Kopech pitching out of a jam, Luke Voit turning an unassisted double play, Tyler Wade mixing in some of that Deadball smallball with a bunt single and a steal. What made it great was baseball players playing baseball.

Some people came away from last night saying baseball should have more events like this. I came away from it wondering what it would be like if the other 2,429 games on the schedule got this kind of treatment. You know why last night’s game looked so good? Because Fox produced it like an NFL game. It treated it like an NFL game. It celebrated it like an NFL game.

It’s funny, after baseball spent decades turning itself into a television afterthought, we’ve now had two games on broadcast television, outside of normal windows, in five days. The Cubs and White Sox were on ABC Sunday night, and the Yankees and White Sox were on Fox last night. This used to be more common, of course; NBC started showing night games regularly in the 1970s, and ABC picked up that baton in 1976 but slowly backed away from prime-time baseball over the course of the 1980s. The CBS deal, which started in 1990, included no weeknight prime-time games on network TV, and the feature games of the week shifted to ESPN.

The story of the last 40 years has been baseball becoming a lesser presence on network TV and the NFL becoming a TV behemoth. That’s not something that just happened, though. MLB chose this path, chose to partner with networks that treated the sport like an afterthought for six months, chose to diminish itself on the national stage, chose to regionalize itself.

It’s time to make different choices. Last night's lesson isn’t that events are cool, but that baseball is cool. Hell, forget what happened in Iowa. Last night, Shohei Ohtani threw six innings, allowed one run, and hit a double. Home Run Derby champ Pete Alonso walked off the Nationals to create a virtual three-way tie atop the NL East. The Giants, an incredible story, won again to stretch their NL West lead to five games. If you can’t find three hours a week to put those stories and a hundred others on prime-time television, you’re not a partner.

For three decades MLB chose to let television treat it as a stepchild. What we saw last night is what happens when a baseball game gets treated like a football game, promoted as a game you have to see, produced with the best of everything, selling superstars you have to watch.

MLB has to stop apologizing for itself and demand that kind of treatment all the time. What we saw from a cornfield in the middle of nowhere last night could just as easily be broadcast from Chavez Ravine next week and Citi Field the week after that and the Trop the week after that. Big games between contending teams featuring huge stars, buried not on channels 206 and 587 but on 5 and 11, promoted and broadcast proudly the way Packers/Cowboys or Patriots/Steelers are.

The signature scene in “Field of Dreams” is a speech by James Earl Jones’s Terence Mann. “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.” In just three minutes, Mann makes the case for baseball more passionately than anyone in baseball has made for it in fifty years. The game needs that now. It doesn’t need gambling partnerships and crypto deals and NFT plays. It needs the game’s stewards to stand behind its game and its players and proudly demand what it got last night, all the time.

meanwhile, people in iowa are blacked out from watching the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers! crazy

it's like please, please, don't watch baseball. especially if you paid for it

people in iowa, you must go the field of dreams to watch baseball. it is the only place where mlb will let you watch baseball

If you build it, they will begrudgingly come and complain about the beer prices

chris sale is set to return from the dead soon

yeah Hulu dropped the Brewers games and it basically took me from being able to rattle off all the players' stats to not even knowing who's all on the team anymore. MLB should do something about that!!

Manfred feels quite demonstrably the worst of a long line of bad baseball commissioners

And I feel he has not even come close to reaching his nadir

pic.twitter.com/AaaZ2tiQxj

— Lindsay Zoladz (@lindsayzoladz) August 14, 2021

The stars seem to have aligned for the Barves at just the right time. Their strength of schedule looks pretty favorable for the rest of the season too.

this afternoon I took a nap and had a dream about a bar poker game that I did not go to (it was last Friday and I really wanted to play but backroom bar games are kind of a dicey proposition right now). in this dream a guy is telling me about the cash game and who was all there and he mentions that the big winner in the cash game was Barry Zito. I have not thought about Barry Zito in years, never really paid much attention to him, and now he's like the one guy named in this random dream of mine? was he in the news or something lately? how did this get caught in my subconscious?

it means barry zito was dreaming about you too

barry zito is a baseball legend in some quarters

wait - there's people who don't dream about Zito every night?!
i call it my "zito time"!

This is, like, best case scenario with a Cameo. https://t.co/EKjtxaDELT

— Brian Heater (@bheater) August 17, 2021

22 days ago the red sox were up 9 1/2 games on the yankees; now they are even

Barry Zito, one of the first MLB players to understand the power of Twitter, is a legend in this quarter.

Barry Zito taught me how to drive

Milwaukee is 73-47

Rowdy Tellez slashing .333/.414/.613/1.027

Jack Morris, still a dipshit.

The fact that this type of lazy racism keeps popping up around Shohei Ohtani speaks to so much of the media being apathetic and lacking any empathy towards the AAPI experience https://t.co/t1MCKhanCc

— Joon 이준엽 (@joonlee) August 18, 2021

A reminder: Jack Morris told my friend, the immensely talented late Washington Post sports columnist Jennifer Frey, “I only talk to women when I’m naked when they’re on top of me or I’m on top of them.” She was an intern at the time, in the clubhouse, doing her job. https://t.co/XPkk8kI7iN

— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) August 18, 2021

surprised he didn't try the whole "I was doing Elmer Fudd" defense

Freddie Freeman's having a night (got the cycle in the 6th).

so many teams deserve to be lads-ed

max fried with a 90-pitch maddux against god's chosen team

K. Akin (L, 0-8) 7.92

reds and padres now even for the second NL wild card with the latter in free-fall

padres' schedule is brutal, too -- *half* their remaining 38 games are against the dodgers or giants

yikes

Wow

Happy 51st birthday to ⁦@Brewers⁩ manager Craig Counsell. Craig is now the same age that Harvey Kuenn was when he led the team to the 1982 World Series.

Anyone else a little messed up by this? pic.twitter.com/rs5VKlayKX

— Doug Russell (@DougRussell) August 22, 2021

harvey's fault for not having that insane batting stance

Yelich's swing is just so sweet. That homer to center was a bomb.

No sweeter sound than the loud thwack and immediate roar from the crowd

only one that i know of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbFaltAkKmY

Reds just pulled Antone with a 3-2 count after he injured himself...I knew you could do this, but I've never actually seen it done. Does he get charged the run if the batter scores or does it go to the new pitcher?

I’ve seen it where the batter is injured mid-at bat and the new pinch hitter inherits the same count. The pinch hitter then struck out but the K was charged to the injured hitter.

this suggests that, given a 3-2 count, if the batter walks and later scores, it would be charged to antone. any other method of him scoring would be charged to the reliever

Rule 10.16 (h) The procedure when more than one pitcher is involved in giving a base on balls.

A relief pitcher shall not be held accountable when the first batter to whom he pitches reaches first base on four called balls, if such batter has a decided advantage in the ball and strike count when pitchers are changed.

(1) If, when pitchers are changed, the count is:

2 balls, no strikes

2 balls, 1 strike

3 balls, no strikes

3 balls, 1 strike

3 balls, 2 strikes,

and the batter gets a base on balls, the official scorer shall charge that batter and the base on balls to the preceding pitcher, not to the relief pitcher.

(2) Any other action by such batter, such as reaching base on a hit, an error, a fielder's choice, a force out, or being touched by a pitched ball, shall cause such a batter to be charged to the relief pitcher.

(3) If, when pitchers are changed, the count is:

2 balls, 2 strikes

1 ball, 2 strikes

1 ball, 1 strike

1 ball, no strikes

no ball, 2 strikes

no ball, 1 strike,

the official scorer shall charge that batter and the actions of that batter to the relief pitcher.

So sayeth the Lord.

Tommy Edman is tied for the NL lead in doubles (32), and has a .379 SLG and .121 ISO

Braves with 2 nights off in a row, weird