2021 World Series Atlanta Braves vs. Houston Astros

Much better start

Last night I forgot about 4K, today I signed in and watching my first 4K sporting event

Pretty sweet to look at tbh

Last year's Super Bowl was not available in 4K for Android TV they have upgraded that this year

feel like that's an out basically always in the regular season, cool that they finally got this right

Maybe this is a hangover from the Jays' near-miss, but I haven't had any interest in this series thus far.

(I'm always posting about not watching a lot of baseball, but I usually make an exception for the WS.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/10/28/braves-chop-world-series-atlanta/

When the World Series shifts to Atlanta for Game 3 on Friday night, television viewers will see a pocket of resistance. While other professional sports franchises have backed away from or removed ties to Native American imagery, the Atlanta Braves have retrenched. In late innings and key moments, fans yell a faux war chant and swing their arms in a ritual known as the “tomahawk chop.” At Truist Park, which opened in 2017, a giant neon tomahawk beyond the center field fence slashes along with the crowd. Fans can dine at the Coors Light Chop House overlooking right field.

After years of colleges and high schools retiring Native American mascots, sometimes as required under state law, the past 18 months have seen a change at the highest level of sports. Under pressure from corporate sponsors in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the national reckoning it sparked, the Washington Football Team ditched its former name, which is defined as a slur. The Cleveland Indians, who already had banished their caricature logo, will be known as the Guardians starting next year.

With the World Series spotlight on the franchise for the first time since 1999, the Braves are viewed by advocates as a holdout amid an overdue cultural shift, clinging to a name that offends and dehumanizes a minority group out of deference to fan loyalty and branding.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Crystal Echo Hawk, CEO of advocacy group IllumiNative. “It used to be, ‘This would be almost impossible; this would be millions and millions of dollars’ — all the things the teams traditionally have thrown up as these barriers and these excuses. Now we have two major teams who have gone through this and literally thousands of schools across the country. The time is now. … It’s just really mind-boggling to watch Atlanta really dig in on this.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred made MLB’s stance clear with comments ahead of Game 1 against the Houston Astros on Tuesday, saying baseball is marketed locally and the sport must align itself with the preferences of local consumers. He said the Braves have done a “phenomenal job” of outreach to local Native American communities, the largest of which supports the Braves financially and culturally.

“The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop,” Manfred said. “For me, that’s kind of the end of the story.”

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the largest local tribe in the Atlanta region, has a long-standing relationship with the Braves, Principal Chief Richard Sneed said. It once manufactured tourist items such as tomahawks and bows and arrows, which it sold to the Braves to offer at souvenir stands. As revenue from its ownership of a casino pulled the tribe out of poverty, its relationship with the Braves changed. It is now a corporate sponsor.

The Braves declined to make anyone available for comment on the name but emphasized their efforts to connect with Native Americans in the area and honor them with exhibits at Truist Park.

Sneed viewed his tribe’s relationship with the team as “a platform” to tell the story of Cherokee culture. In July, the Braves held Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Night at Truist Park, where Sneed said tribal elders were treated “like royalty.” This year, the Braves sold T-shirts with a word that translated roughly to “ballplayer” in Cherokee syllabary; the proceeds supported the tribe’s language immersion program.

...The Braves are not alone in pro sports; the NFL has the Kansas City Chiefs, whose fans also do the chop. But baseball, both inside and outside Atlanta, has ceded ground in the debate. As it evaluated its name, Cleveland canvassed Native Americans and found “the name can make it especially challenging for children to find a place for their Native identity in the community around them.” In 2019, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Ryan Helsley, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that seeing the tomahawk chop was “disappointing.”

“I think it’s a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general,” Helsley said during the Cardinals’ National League Division Series matchup with the Braves that year. “Just depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way who aren’t intellectual. They are a lot more than that. It’s not me being offended by the whole mascot thing. It’s not. It’s about the misconception of us, the Native Americans, and how we’re perceived in that way or used as mascots.”

hi, i'm joe buck! before we start playing game 3, i just wanted to say,

Team names are only part of the issue. Fans have attended Braves games in redface and headdresses. Echo Hawk and Payment noted that opposing fans will use slurs and offensive stereotypes. “Somebody starts blurting out, ‘Scalp the Indians,’ or, ‘Feed them whiskey and send them back to the res,’ ” Payment said.

“When you think about the global viewership of the World Series and you suddenly see tens of thousands of fans engaging in that behavior and suddenly you’ve got that being mimicked back to our children and our communities, it is so deeply offensive and harmful, and it makes our children oftentimes feel ashamed of who they are,” Echo Hawk said. “We are constantly reduced to these dehumanizing caricatures and stereotypes and not seen for who we are today.”

Payment imagined a stadium full of fans implored to act as if performing a minstrel show. The public response would be swift and condemnatory, and the ritual would be halted immediately. The only difference with the chop, Payment argued, is that society fails to recognize Native Americans as part of the U.S. population.

“We have objectified Indians as a relic of the past,” Payment said. “A lot of people don’t have a clue we exist still. They don’t think about how it might affect Native American youth or people.”

Payment believes those who want the Braves to keep their name already have lost and don’t know it yet.

“It’s just a matter of time,” he said. “Some of the people involved with the decision-making of the Atlanta team are going to look back and say, ‘Oh, my God.’ The grandchild of the owners today are going to say: ‘Boy, Grandpa was a racist. He didn’t realize it, but he was a racist.’ I think it’s just a matter of time.”

-- now let's play some baseball!

Someone make a new hot stove thread please. I can't think of a funny title.

Sources: The Padres and Bob Melvin have agreed to a three-year deal to make Melvin the next manager in San Diego.

— AJ Cassavell (@AJCassavell) October 28, 2021

Holy moly I didn't think he was leaving Oakland for a long time

Apparently the A's are cutting costs again. He made too much money.

Didn’t they extend him not long ago? I think dude would just rather manage a team that is spending money.

Yeah he was signed for this year, and yet they let the Padres take him without compensation. Curious

They also have a huge class of arbitration-eligible players:

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2021/09/athletics-trade-rumors-payroll-arbitration-olson-chapman-manaea-bassitt.html

these could be the final three games of pitchers hitting

we'll still have ohtani

wanna say I'll miss it but I suspect it'll be one of those things I just never think of again

yeah, it'll probably be fine. but really, end of an era

To not experience the joy of a Todd Stottlemyre running the bases, that'll be tough.

Logan Webb hit a home run in his last at bat in the regular season

oh yeah, the Giants had Madison Bumgarner too

i will miss the old rules and strategy but yeah most of the time is sucked

Just in case my post makes no sense, I finally found a good clip of this:

https://www.mlb.com/bluejays/video/stottlemyre-on-his-famous-slide-c2372168183

One of my favourite baseball moments ever. Love Stottlemyre's "Yup."

I like pitching duels

Good call, I would have called that a strike

Didn't matter, why swing at that pitch

Big moment

Should have the third baseman got to that ball?

No

I'm bored obviously, anyone want to join me tonight?

Huge out

Wow

3 2/3

5

Don't agree that Anderson being taken out without giving up a hit

Yeah it seems like no starting pitcher is allowed to go deep in the postseason anymore

i think it’s a little odd considering they’re headed for back-to-back bullpen games, but also he was throwing as many balls as strikes and was never going to go the distance

So far it’s all justified.

jesus.
he could have made that catch right?

yeah kinda shocked he didn't but I think the SS backing up on him caused his brain to malfunction

Matzek has just been unreal

is that the first actual hit by Houston

The second!

oh they called that a hit lol

Excellent teaser from Joe Posnanski: "6th inning: Atlanta manager Brian Snitker took Anderson out of the game after five innings even though he had (1) not allowed a hit and (2) only thrown 76 pitches. I do have a lot to say about this — like A LOT to say about this, like a BOOK-LENGTH amount to say about this — but books take a while to write, and so for now let’s stay focused on the game and the way the Braves somehow shut down this brilliant offense."

(I was hoping for the no-hitter so I could have come on here and posted that it was the most exciting thing I'd seen since six Raptors combined for 101 points.)

Sheehan:

Ian Anderson got the first 15 outs, and while he did not give up a hit -- we’ll get to that -- he wasn’t dominant. To pick just one number, Anderson had a CSW% of 29%, which per the stat’s creator, Alex Fast, is just “okay.” (CSW% is simple: the rate of called and swinging strikes as a percentage of pitches thrown.) The Astros did have trouble squaring up Anderson; he allowed just three hard-hit balls, and only one batted ball with an expected batting average of even .300. Eyeballing more conventional numbers, Anderson walked three and struck out four, hardly the hallmarks of a dominant performance, and at no point watching him did I think I was watching a dominant performance.

The dominance would come after Anderson left. Four Braves relievers combined for 12 outs, striking out three, walking no one (hitting one batter) and shutting out the Astros to finish out a 2-0 win.

and more:

I almost don’t want to engage on the decision to pull Ian Anderson after five innings, because I think the people rending their garments over it are arguing in bad faith. They’re ignoring what was clear from watching Anderson, what’s clear from watching playoff games in recent years, what’s clear from watching baseball in 2021. Pitching requires so much effort now that completing nine innings under benign circumstances is a difficult task. Doing it in the playoffs, at the end of a seven-month season, against postseason lineups tuned to maximum performance, is nearly impossible. Doing it when you have rested and ready teammates who haven’t thrown 70, 80, 90 pitches is folly.

The no-hitter is just not relevant to me. That cannot be part of Snitker’s thinking at all, not least because the chance that Ian Anderson was going to finish last night’s game is fiction. Snitker’s job is to win a game, to win a championship, not be part of baseball’s culture war over The Diminishing Role of the Starting Pitcher. At some point, a segment of the baseball world decided that starting pitchers are star quarterbacks, and it just isn’t so, not least because star quarterbacks play every game.

I’ve said this a few times now, and I will repeat it: Pitching in the modern baseball playoffs is the hardest pitching there has ever been. Stop comparing what these pitchers are asked to do with the rest of baseball history, even history as recent as six or seven years ago. Whoever your particular heroes are...Ford, Gibson, Morris...they’d be maxing out at seven innings and averaging 5 2/3 the same way the guys we’re watching are.

Anderson had thrown 76 pitches, and even at a startling ten pitches an inning over the next three would have been at 106 entering the ninth. That would have been the third time in 38 career starts, postseason included, that Anderson threw more than 100 pitches in a game. His career high, set in May, is 110, and he had not reached 100 pitches in a start since then. More likely, of course, is that Anderson would have needed another 15 pitches an inning, pushing him over 100 in the seventh, to 120 in the eighth.

Ian Anderson was never finishing this game, so once that’s settled, we’re just haggling over when he leaves. The top of the order the third time around is always a good choice. (Anderson’s tiny sample TTP numbers are far less relevant than what we know about all pitchers the third time around.) Brian Snitker gave the Braves the best chance to win by taking Anderson out when he did. Snitker focusing on anything else -- a no-hitter, entertainment value, pleasing starting-pitcher fetishists -- would have been grounds for firing.

Sheehan otm.

otm

All of which might even be exactly what Joe P. wants to write in his book; at the very least, he's certainly aware of all that--he wrote a column two weeks ago about how much harder it was for Chris Sale to pitch against the Astros in 2021 that for Sandy Koufax to pitch a two-hitter against the Twins in 1965. But, as I've said before, I don't have to like any of it; it just makes the game less interesting. (And yes, I realize that Atlanta's manager isn't there to make the game interesting for me.) The idea that great starting pitching performances in the World Series are a thing of the past--or that they've been so re-defined that they may as well be--is not a happy thought.

Somebody on here said more or less the same thing that I'm saying a few days ago...can't remember who or what thread. It all makes me think of a line from Zodiac: "Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true." Just because something makes sense doesn't mean I have to like it.