2022 MLB General Season Chatter: Ghost Runners On The Half-Billion Dollar Infield

Holy fuck. If my neighbours were asleep, they’re not anymore

the yankees have signed utterly washed-up cardinals legend matt carpenter and are using him tonight as a designated hitter, which seems like a slap in the face to everyone else in the organization

i have just heard about this, along with the news that he shaved and looks weird, and i am desperately searching for info

apparently he was putting up above average production in AAA for the rangers, which would be the first sustained period of non-awfulness for him since maybe 2018?

Our first look at Matt Carpenter in his Yankees threads! pic.twitter.com/H65bm89DQI

— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) May 26, 2022

he can still draw walks i guess

David Strathairn, DH

J.D. Martinez is hitting .380 right now, albeit with less power than usual. He's been such an amazing hitter through his career...Weird thing is, his top comps for Similarity Score are Nolan Arenado on the one side (career numbers only) and Jim Edmonds on the other (age specific), two fabled defensive players...Martinez has next to no defensive value, no?

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/martijd02.shtml#all_appearances

I guess Similarity Scores are based on offense only--I always thought there was at least a built-in position component.

makes you really appreciate arenado and edmonds - both of them similar to JD Martinez (at least at the moment, compared to their career (arenado) or late-career (edmonds), but with astounding defense as well

However, Jim Edmonds is the one of the worst 10 broadcasters of all time, which makes his early HoF bow-out seem better in retrospect. dude needs to not be in the hall of fame and to just shut up for a minute

nevermind. i retract any trace of optimism i had from carpenter's minor league line

There’s also a complicating factor: he’s not hitting the baseball very hard. His average exit velocity in the minors this year stands at only 86.0 mph. That would rank him 230th out of 260 qualified players, via Statcast, and that’s against pitchers who are largely significantly inferior to the ones he’ll face with the Yankees. He does a little better in hard-hit percentage but still would rank in the bottom third of baseball; his 35.5% rate is 187th out of 260, again with the additional caveat that he’s facing weaker pitching. That’s enough to take some of the optimism out of the signing for me.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/matt-carpenter-resurfaces-with-the-yankees/

matt carpenter used to beat the shift with above average power, great contact skills, and lots of walks and deep counts.

i'm not not sure what order those elements disappeared during his decline (which happened steeply a few years ago and only got worse), but to me it looked like the power went first. he had lots of back injuries, too, probably a heavy factor. if his back feels anything like mine does, i have no idea how or why he is still attempting to be a pro baseball man. once his power went, he was no longer driving the ball over the outfielders (or into the seats) but instead right into a wall of shifted fielders. he continued to draw some walks, but pitchers started challenging him more, and he did not meet the challenge and never has, ever since 2018

i think the apple+ broadcast is pretty awful, based on the two that i've seen, once in early season, one last week. among many, many other things, they repeatedly got the names of the players wrong. Not just once or twice, but five, six, seven times. i tuned out near the end.

one thing i DO like about it is the general presentation, and although i'm sure it's annoying to many, i actually like the little pitch-by-pitch probabilities in the corner of the screen.

turns out even those are awful. they're based on a proprietary machine learning kinda deal from nVenue which uses 120 inputs to come up with the probabilities. this fangraphs writer compared it to his own extremely rudimentary model, using nothing but widely available hit-type probabilities based on count. turns out this dude's one-variable model ended up predicting the outcome better than the proprietary secret sauce on apple is using.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-good-are-those-probabilities-on-the-apple-tv-broadcasts/

MLB announcement: Free-agent pitcher Carlos Martínez has received an 80-game suspension without pay after testing positive for Ibutamoren, a performance-enhancing substance. Martínez formerly is of the Cardinals and recently was released by the Red Sox.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 27, 2022

So Carpenter hit one out today.

And this Apple broadcast is god awful

in the spirit of, uh, trying to make connections with baseball players i've always hated, i'm looking at craig kimbrel's career stats, and they're pretty unbelievable. for active relievers (min 150 IP), his career 2.19 ERA is second only to Josh Hader's 2.15 ERA, and Kimbrel's stats (640 IP, 13 seasons) cover twice as many innings and seasons as Hader's (297 IP, 6 seasons)

among the relative old-timers, only kenley jansen (2.41 ERA across 723 IP) and darren o'day (2.56 ERA, 598 IP).

so a tip of the hat to that weird dumb hangy arm thing he does. seems to distract players and has consistently given him an edge through the years

man, i used to root for tommy pham pretty hard, because he was one of those guys with tons of talent who faced so many ridiculous obstacles on his way up, including lots of weird injuries, his persistent eye issues. but wtf is up with this guy now

CINCINNATI -- Major League Baseball is investigating a pregame altercation that occurred on Friday afternoon between the Reds’ Tommy Pham and the Giants’ Joc Pederson.

Pham was scratched from Cincinnati’s lineup shortly before first pitch, with a Reds spokesperson saying he agreed to sit out pending MLB’s investigation.

“MLB is investigating the incident that occurred before the game involving Mr. Pham,” said an MLB spokesperson. “Mr. Pham agreed to not play this evening, pending the results of MLB’s investigation.”

Reds players were taking batting practice at Great American Ball Park when Pham and Pederson met out in left field. Pederson said Pham confronted him and slapped him on the face over a dispute involving the fantasy football league that included both players as participants last year. Several players intervened in the situation, and both clubs’ dugouts and bullpens emptied.

“Unfortunate situation,” Pederson said following the Reds’ 5-1 win. “Kind of stemmed from a fantasy football league we both were in last year. I put a player on the injured reserve when they were listed as out and then added another player. And then there was a text message in the group [chat] saying that I was cheating because I was stashing players on my bench.

Maybe take it his convo to the fantasy thread, but I feel like it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do?!

Mets booth were speculating it might be a cover story, a la last year’s “rat or raccoon” fiasco

i require context on that one!

Tommy Pham said Pederson said “disrespectful shit” about the Padres and “fucked with my money”

— C. Trent Rosecrans (@ctrent) May 28, 2022

i love this, tommy pham should fight everyone in baseball

Thermo: Last year McNeil and Lindor had an in-game squabble down the dugout tunnel, and a bunch of bench members rushed down there to break it up when it got heated. At the end of the game, they described it as an argument over whether the animal they saw in the tunnel was a rat or a raccoon. It was clearly not about that.

Pham caping for the Friars is so strange. He played a year and change and then they got rid of him

i get that some athletes fire themselves up by fixating on ‘disrespect’ but tommy pham is a head case (with a three-game suspension)

also, dallas keuchel has been DFA’d by the white sox

Pham is the idiot in this case. Piecing this thing together from Pham's comments. Joc talked shit about his club, sounds like trash talking to me and probably goes on all the time. But, this is all about fantasy Football, which ended months ago. Pham, instead of dealing with it at the time, let it fester until he saw Joc next. He then went up to him and slapped him while in pre-game warmups. He then gets a three-game suspension which is not being appealed. Life huh?

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to defend the honor of the San Diego padres, we've all been there

lol

San Diego padres

Brilliant.

Joc showed up with receipts of the fantasy football group chat with Tommy Pham, which included a GIF making fun of the Padres last season pic.twitter.com/rCYbFRdwA8

— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) May 29, 2022

not defending Tommy Pham’s actions but Joc Pederson has a very slappable face

sorry what year is it??

https://i.imgur.com/as9pALk.png

it turns out that a while back, time started folding back in on itself. some things change, but others are locked in

i'm still kinda pissed about tommy pham!

i mean if you or i premeditatedly slapped a colleague -- let alone over gambling on sports -- we'd be instantly fired, and rightly so

does he only get three games because joc is a big boy himself? or because the players union would object to more? how would it be different if he'd slapped a clubhouse manager? or an umpire?

i guess tommy pham can't exactly be fired, but he should at least have been suspended far longer

Good points and you're 1000% correct.

So why is Martin Perez suddenly amazing? What the hell.

he had flashes of brilliance for the red sox, i was sad to see him go

We’re maybe 30% into the season and he’s pitched absolutely god like. I have kind of a hard time reading the tea leaves on savant pages - but this looks like a real break through and not just a 9-game fluke (at age 31!). What’s he doing differently this year?? I think this turnaround is nuts

hey when you got it you got it

look up the Azocar outfield assist in the first inning of today's padres game. holy crap, that's pretty much exactly how you play it

I can’t tell if it’s because the play is so smooth, but that looks like some Ill-advised base running.

yeah, gorman isn't the fastest and he's just coming up from the minors, so he's probably not used to the ball being whipped back in so quickly

still, i was impressed.

however, later in the game Azocar almost wiped out CF Grisham on a ball that was clearly Grisham's. that is my least favorite play in baseball, the near-collision. i watch through my fingers.

obvs still preferable to actual collision.
seeing kurt suzuki suddenly drop in the angels dugout the other day was pretty freaky too

KM, Do you know why the Cards gave up on Nick Plummer? He’s looked good for the Mets the past two days. Lot of sneaky power. Small sample size and all.

Honestly, I hadn’t realized he was with the Mets now! He elected (minor league) free agency? I didn’t realize he’s been with the cardinals org long enough to do so.

He has a big breakout year in 2021, after several years of disappointing results. I remember his first round signing being roundly criticized even on the day it happened, and from the start, the few updates I’d see about him were generally of the “looks like a bust” variety. Looking at his early milb stats, they don’t seem _that bad_, but he was also usually relatively old for his levels he was playing at, I think.

Anyway, all that seems like ancient history. His 2021 was really great, enough to get him back in the conversation for the big league roster, but he was blocked in the OF by several others, so I can see why he and the cardinals might have parted way amicably? Don’t know.

1/4 of the Dodgers losses this year have been to the Pirates.

It’s even more than that now. First Pirates sweep in LA since 2000.

Josh Donaldson hurt New York Yankees didn't publicly support him after comment about Tim Anderson

poor guy

Aww.

Cano to El Paso free agency

couldn't have happened to a more wealthy guy