Gramsci wrote: Thu May 30, 2024 3:01 am I’ve been reading up on Reinsdorf… I assume the entire fan base hate the guy.

Many people who own baseball teams are worse human beings.

Among the owners, he is among the worst specifically at owning an MLB team. If not the worst.

I've been watching baseball since I was a toddler, and I don't remember a franchise being quite this rudderless in the last twenty years. I'm sure there is one, but it wasn't anything that registered.

They're on track for one of the three worst seasons since WWII or something like that.

Their starting left fielder--starting!--was on track to achieve a -4.0 WAR this season, which would be worst all-time. All-time. And he is starting.

I say "was on track" because he hit a home run the other night and that helped him out a bit.

There's one position player on the team who is any good--Robert, who is massively underperforming--and one starting pitcher who is good--Crochet. Otherwise, it's high-AAA baseball at best.

jimmy spako wrote: Wed Jun 26, 2024 11:32 am

trey wrote: Wed May 29, 2024 3:04 pm Astros fan here. Please don't throw anything at me. They're having a rough season. Blew a lead against Seattle last night in the 8th. That's been the story all season. I was not a baseball fan until I met my wife in the 90's. She grew up down the street from the Astrodome and went to games all the time since she was a kid. When we started going out, she started taking me to games in the Dome. Pretty soon I was hooked. Over 25 years later I still don't possess a fraction of her knowledge of the game. I sometimes think she could manage a team. It's been great to watch them go on a tear for the past 7 years or so. Hope they can turn it around. They got Jose Abreu from the White Sox last year, but he's struggled almost the whole time. He just returned from Florida this week where he went willingly to work on his hitting. Fingers crossed.

My little dude here latched onto them over the past years as his favorite team and I am happy to tell him they're set to hit .500 and are more than in it from here on out. Jettisoned Abreu and not going to trade Bregman anymore either, I would have to imagine.

Cheers to you and your little dude! They managed to pull it off, 7 game streak. That's huge for the Astros this season. Lot of season left to play. Please no more bad injuries, FFS.

Reinsdorf is also the owner most responsible for precipitating the strike in 1994. The team he owned was in first place that year and kicking ass. What could have been.

Looking at the 1994 Expos lineup, would have loved to see what that team could have done.

Well, the Sox are finally looking like a normal team…

One observation about baseball is… you can be a bit chubby and still play in an elite sport…

Question. Where’s women’s baseball? In Europe the football teams have mirror female teams. That doesn’t appear to be the case with MLB?

Gramsci wrote: Sat Jun 29, 2024 4:25 am Well, the Sox are finally looking like a normal team…

One observation about baseball is… you can be a bit chubby and still play in an elite sport…

Baseball is the most purely skills-oriented team sport. Maybe cricket but I don't know anything about cricket and it confuses me.

Most sports, at a competitive level, require baseline agility and stamina beyond basically anyone who doesn't play them. But there's usually room for enforcers and other brute force figures.

Baseball has no use for pure brute force. You have to be able to perform some subset of incredibly baseball-specific tasks to make it.

If you're left-handed and can locate three pitches, you can be David Wells and pitch for twenty years, despite being built like a retired firefighter a lot of that time.

Question. Where’s women’s baseball? In Europe the football teams have mirror female teams. That doesn’t appear to be the case with MLB?

Culturally, women play fast-pitch softball here. It's a sport through college. I guess there's some pro league but it's not a big thing.

The bifurcation of softball and baseball as far as women are concerned has hampered any possibility of a pro league. There's just no infrastructure for women's baseball in the US to speak of.

Other countries have more active opportunities (and are more baseball-crazy in general, honestly--Dominican Republic, Japan, Cuba, Mexico...).

Face any pitcher, any time: Inside MLB's new Trajekt tech


Interesting in the back-and-forth tension between pitching and hitting improvements through the use of technology.

See also:

MLB offense is nearing all-time lows — hitters have theories: ‘Pitching is out of control’

A moment of silence for the meatball

Should we start with technology? Sure. Let’s blame technology. The hitters definitely are.

“With the technology now,” Yelich said, “with the analytics and the high-speed cameras and the TrackMan data and all that stuff, you can tell, as a pitcher, if your pitches are good or bad, and how they work, and which kind of pitches you should throw in the biggest spots.”

Does that seem like anything new? Not to you, the reader, maybe. But to the hitters? They miss those days when hitting was about working their way into a hitter’s count and waiting for that meatball they knew was coming when a pitcher was desperate to get back into the count.

“I think in the past, guys would throw pitches that sucked, and they honestly didn’t know,” Yelich said. “Seriously. There would be no way for you to tell them otherwise, other than relaying info from your catcher to the pitcher that ‘I don’t really like this pitch. This one’s not working.’ So they wouldn’t know it wasn’t good or why it wasn’t good. So they’d still throw it all the time.”

But now, those days feel as ancient as when the fielders played with no gloves. Pitchers head into the pitching lab and see what works and what doesn’t. Then those meatball pitches get tossed right into the dumpster, never to return.

Either that or they get redesigned with shapes, angles and tunneling that make them more effective. That work is being done on every pitch thrown by every pitcher.

I had been blissfully ignorant of anything related to baseball recently, after realizing earlier this year that the Cubs were not going to meet expectations, but then I noticed this (satirical) headline by The Onion today:

https://www.theonion.com/mlb-reminds-wh ... DKaQALU5ww

[MLB Reminds White Sox That Games Televised]

I laughed out loud for about 5 minutes.

I sort of recalled earlier posts in this thread but wow, things are bad on the south side.

jfv wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2024 10:52 pm I had been blissfully ignorant of anything related to baseball recently, after realizing earlier this year that the Cubs were not going to meet expectations, but then I noticed this (satirical) headline by The Onion today:

https://www.theonion.com/mlb-reminds-wh ... DKaQALU5ww

[MLB Reminds White Sox That Games Televised]

I laughed out loud for about 5 minutes.

I sort of recalled earlier posts in this thread but wow, things are bad on the south side.

Ouch. There were a few games there when it looked like the Sox were at least a normal team having a bad season. But holy shit have they sunk into the depths of awful. But I’m hanging in.

I'm going to see the Mariners a week from tomorrow. I was bummed that Julio and J.P. will probably still be on the IL or rehabbing, but am now very psyched to get to see Arozarena in the outfield.

Also encouraged that Yeli might not have to have back surgery just yet. Have been pulling for that dude for years, inspired by his stoicism and grinding to get back into form and very happy to see him raking again. I hope he can somehow stick around for what could still be a special season (but would also wish him some kind of more permanent fix of his back issue). I'm curious whether the Brewers will now still try to trade for a starter and possibly a bat, or just pitching in the end.