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

funny end to Brewers/Pirates, down 4-2 the Pirates hit an RBI single but Newman also tries to score and gets thrown out at home by a mile. so Hader gets an ER and a Save on the same play. wonder how many times in MLB history that's happened

oh and Reds winning on a walkoff balk

xp i doubt that it's *that* rare

that was a pretty bad send (and newman didn't look too happy about it), but . . . hader on the mound, two outs, i'm not sure the odds of the next guy driving in that run are much better than forcing the brewers defense to make two good throws

and if not, well, maybe there's time for a late dinner reservation

it's that kind of season again for the angels

Mike Trout went 3-5 with a home run. Shohei Ohtani went 3-5 with a home run. And the Angels lose to the Orioles 5-4 on a walk-off

— Ben Verlander (@BenVerlander) July 9, 2022

no one can stop the orioles

Orioles *are* only 3 games out of the last wild card

Everything about Jeter Downs — his name, getting the last minute call up to play last night’s game, scoring his first MLB RBI, and then scoring the winning run — was so fun last night.

As a baseball fan (as opposed to a Jays fan--this won't help), really glad to see Chris Sale back today--five shutout innings. Even with all his lost time, I don't think he's out of HOF contention. He's 33 right now; he'd need to pitch well until he's 40, probably, but the foundation of a HOF career is there.

Looks like the Royals are the most unvaccinated team so far (they have 10 players who can't play in Toronto)

ffs matt carpenter is now batting .356/.466/.904 with 12 homers and 27 RBI in 30 games

the balk that resulted in the winning run for SF was one of the most bullshit calls I've ever seen in baseball, totally against the spirit of the rule

Yankees with multiple games of 7+ RBI in a season:

Matt Carpenter (2022)
Joe DiMaggio (1940)
Lou Gehrig (1934, '30)
Babe Ruth (1929)

— Katie Sharp (@ktsharp) July 17, 2022

sheehan agrees w me about 7-inning games

Baseball should move to seven-inning games.

Lopping two innings off the game cuts out about 40 minutes, rolling back game times to what they were during the 1970s. Ever notice, at the game, that the crowd tends to leave around two-and-a-half hours in no matter what is happening? That’s about how long casual fans, and most people with kids, will stay at the ballpark. They’re leaving at 9:30 unless someone’s got a no-hitter going or you’re already in the bottom of the ninth with some drama possible.

Lopping two innings off games saves teams 324 innings a year. I would love to shave the bottom 10,000 innings of pitching and pitchers off the sport. Few things are slowing baseball down now like the fringe pitcher throwing all sliders in a 7-1 game in the eighth because he’s desperate to stay in the majors at $3,300/day and the JW Marriott rather than be back in the minors at $100/day and the Bedbug Inn. Teams are telling us, with their actions, that they don’t think they can cover 1,440 innings a season with good pitchers, not even with any kind of pitchers.

It’s an elegant solution. Don’t think of it as eliminating the eighth and ninth innings; think of it as eliminating the sixth and seventh, those innings that starters no longer pitch, the ones that go to these anonymous pitchers who have been developed not as baseball players, but as spinbots, designed to do one or maybe as many as two things for an inning and then leave so the next one can enter.

The middle innings are baseball’s problem in the age of the five-inning starter. We’ve had the rising action of the early frames, and we’re eager for the drama of the late ones. The middle innings are so often a slog now, anonymous pitchers running the count to 3-2 with two foul balls, striking out or walking the batter, then doing it all again as you get closer to death. Just get rid of them.

there’s a lot more to it but it’s a paid newsletter so i’m not posting the whole thing

It's an interesting idea but there's also the chance that every game turns into a bullpen game.

sheehan is also wrong

for one thing, any concern about game length has already been solved by the pitch clock in the minors which has dramatically reduced game time

for another thing, why are these topics always only looked at through the perspective of pitching? yeah, anonymous middle relievers aren't great. what's worse is games in which hitters only register two plate appearances. that just ain't real baseball sorry!!!

and NTBT is 100% right anyway, teams would just lean harder into their bullpens.

third time through the order starts in inning 5 or 6. if your starter is doing well he’ll go that long just like now. i don’t mind relievers as long as they’re, like, good relievers pitching in meaningful situations.

So much for Chris Sale's return.

the red sox have used seven pitchers and it’s 11-2 with a third of the game still to play

three hours in

Weirdly enough - the jays/ AAA royals game was over in 2 hours and 20 mins.

xp at least they won't have to pitch the ninth

true

jays three pitchers, royals two

maybe you solve this just by severely limiting pitching staffs i don’t know

then you get complaints about injuries and lost union jobs

recall someone suggesting that you only get to keep your DH as long as the starter is in the game (presumably there'd be a workaround for injured starters), but i think that would alter tactics only at the very margins

home run derby is dumb obviously but this seems like a good lineup. a bunch of fun, likeable sluggers (schwarbs, soto, alonso, etc.) but ALSO one really old dude and one really young dude.

Chris Berman is looking forward to seeing Bip Roberts take some hacks tonight.

the AL winning something like 22 of the last 25 ASGs (minus the tie that one time) is pretty bizarre

When I watched through the '70s, starting with the Rose/Fosse game, it was even more lopsided in the other direction: NL won 19 of 20 from '63 to '82.

my dad referred to the AL -- long after it ceased to matter -- as the 'white league'

it's actually fine, though -- i'm not mad at all

In the only game the A.L. won during that stretch, white-guy Fred Lynn hit the first ASG grand slam.

After I saw the clip of Manoah's inning last night, I semi-regretted not watching. The one thing you can say is that they're still actually playing baseball (as opposed to whatever they do in the NBA ASG). I'm sure pitchers don't go inside much, because no one wants to end anyone's career in an ASG (Pete Rose excepted), but otherwise, they play the game. Taking advice from Smoltz while pitching is maybe a bit much.

I actually liked the All-Star game. There is some fine pitching

I only watch one team, so it was nice forcing me to watch the leagues best

goldschmidt and arenado can't make the trip to toronto because they're too busy juggling their balls while watching joe rogan

tommy pham just tried and failed to snap a bat over his knee. footage at 9

it's bumming me out that we're about halfway through the season and four of the six division winners are basically already decided and the winners are the most obvious winning teams possible

sorry i mean three of the six. still.

yep

I'm glad to learn--first time I've bothered to check--that unvaccinated players are docked pay when they can't get into Canada. Drop in the bucket, but it will cost Goldschmidt and Arenado ~620K combined.

i would never have to worry about the cost of my kids education and keeping a roof over their heads for the rest of my life with that money and they can just shrug it off.
just the cost of being so much super duper smarter than everyone else.

I've always admired Goldschmidt's eerie steadiness and anonymity, but this does make me lose some respect for him.

I lost all of mine for him.

same, really

at least he hasn't yet pulled the full realmuto 'i won't let canada tell me what to put in my body' i guess

Basically the Jays right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWk6JcheLMU

i just assume all players are conservative and kind of dumb until i'm proven wrong, which maybe isn't fair, but since the game has a conservative culture in general and players are not encouraged to talk about their social or political beliefs or really express any personality at all that's what i've been forced to do

anthony rizzo being antivax was the frustrating one for me, especially with him being a childhood leukemia survivor you think he'd understand the need to protect the weaker members of our population but i guess not

Arenado was rumored to be unvaxxed (forget why), but Goldschmidt was very surprising. I think everyone assumed Miles Mikolas would be one of the three, though I think it's just because of his mustache.

and yeah, it definitely sucks that i am going to be cheering for these two idiots for the next few years. i don't know, it's a separating the art from the artist kind of thing i guess. i will cheer for the dumb baseball men to play well and try to ignore everything else (which is easy with Goldschmidt because he's a mike pence kind of empty personality).

at least we have sean doolittle i guess

This sounds hokey enough to be made up, but it's not. The reason Arenado gives (or at least originally), that he and his wife were trying to conceive, was the same explanation my barber gave for a few months initially. (He had just remarried.) Not in any kind of defiant way--almost apologetically. But then, at some point, his 12-year-old son asked him why they were more worried about a hypothetical child than the one he had. At which point he and his new wife got vaccinated.