ashbury

I'm not going to defend Bucknor. I'm more in sympathy with the umps not working the extra half-inning. It's one of those things where if they see possible erosion of authority, it's best to not go along with even that first inch. It's only a spring game, there's absolutely no harm in an amateur behind the catcher for activity that takes place only because both teams were agreeable, not because league rules mandated it.

It occurs to me that there might be a bias toward readers rather than video watchers in these comments, because the readership gravitated here in the first place. Bonnes could be reaching a new audience.

I tend to avoid podcasts and the like, too, but an aggressively edited two-minute video was hardly a deal breaker for me in this case.

With Squirrel it wouldn't be a sucker punch, it would be running into a door or other obstacle in panic because of a sucker clown mask.

I'll quibble with third over second, if you mean defensive importance. Last season third base ranked behind only first base in aggregate OPS. That seems to me strong evidence that managers will strain to get a good bat into the lineup at that position. Catcher is unique IMO and belongs at the top of your list. Aggregate OPS for catchers ranked last.

Eddie Mathews was not drafted.

The over, but not by much.

Good move to name that one field for Tom Kelly. It was a highlight of my visits to watch him hold court at first base, especially teaching the fine points of the position to players not ready to learn them.

Does Buxton have any minor league options remaining? Send him down and bring up someone who can hit.

If it was a bunt then it was a drag bunt because it went all the way to RF according to the play-by-play.

Gallo leading off? Ughhh.... Oh wait, he went 2-for-2? Single and a double? Best Leadoff Hitter Evar!!!!

Leading the Rays 6-4 midway through 5? Print up those World Series tickets, I'm all in!

At the request of absolutely nobody, I took a closer look at the question of how DHing affects a batter. I went in with the assumption that guys would hit better if they concentrated on only batting on a given day, despite having seen quotes from players that DHing is tough. So I went to the 2022 stats and picked out guys who DHed a lot but also split their time playing positions too. My not-very-random sample was Stanton, McCutchen, Blackmon, Alvarez, Ozuna, Buxton, and Mancini. My expectation was not supported. Only Blackmon had a better OPS as a DH than as a fielder. It's a small sample. Someone else can figure out a more careful study. I don't know how to control for the effect of injury, where a given player is DH only when not 100% physically. But based on this sampling, I guess the players could be right. DH is a tough role. Buxton certainly has said so; I should believe him. It makes what Nelson Cruz accomplished that much more wonderful. And it makes me leery of just picking a player like Polanco and saying, you're my switch-hitting DH now. But I remain leery of spreading the duty around like the current plan seems to be; each such batter doing worse than usual isn't much of a help overall, and finding that special player who can excel at DH becomes more important than ever.

Across the majors last year, aggregate DH output was an OPS of only .710, compared to the overall .707 OPS. (Best by position were 1B and 3B at .746 and .725 respectively, worst unsurprisingly was C at .663.) Apparently the majority of teams must be rotating their DH too. Seems like a dedicated DH is one of the few opportunities for a lower-budget team to find a competitive advantage, even at the cost of a shorter bench for the position players in this era of 13-man batting rosters.

That b-r.com page shows only the last playoff series in a given year. You have to ask, how did they get to the NLCS in 2018, and then you go and find that they swept the Rockies 3-0.

I believe every MLB franchise gets to blackout a region near to them. Out west some of those blackout regions are huge in terms of square miles. Every single spot in the US is blacked out by some team, and many spots are blacked out by multiple teams. It won't do, to disincentivize coming to the ballpark, or paying the local exclusive broadcaster their due, dontchaknow.

Will our DH be better than the opponent's DH, most games? If not, then I don't like this rotational strategy. If a key player needs a day of rest, rest him. A hitter like Nelson Cruz wasn't simply a great DH, he was a cost-effective DH. Because you aren't paying one penny for a glove. When a position player fills the role, his salary doesn't drop for that game, but whatever you're paying for his glove is wasted anyway. Of course it's not easy to find and sign a guy like Cruz, because other teams are in there bidding for his services as well. Having him was good while it lasted. To be clear, given the roster we have now, rotation may be the way to go. I'm talking about roster construction, dating back a few months now. But unless Nick Gordon (for instance) steps up his offense a bit further than he already has (and maybe he can), very many games with him as DH is going to look a lot like that time in the post-season where Jason Tyner DH'ed. And in that case I'm back to criticizing the roster construction. Literally any major league player is capable of filling the DH slot, but that's a low hurdle and I want a DH who excels, same as every spot in the lineup.

I dunno. Now we may have gone from Mount Rushmore to Mount Everest. All alone up there.

Concur. OTOH multi-tool players typically need for all their tools to click, unless you have the fabled 5-tool player like Correa or Buxton who go high in the draft and aren't available anyway where Sabato was chosen. Nick Gordon is the poster child for having no one tool being bad when drafted but no one tool that stood out, and he almost got buried in the minors before finally putting it all together (arguably it was his high draft slot in the first place that caused him to get the long leash, otherwise he might be bouncing around). There's more than one way to reach the majors, and also more than one way to not quite make it. If the talent evaluator really believes in one tool that a player has, it can be a reasonable move to draft that player and hope that one or two additional tools emerge as at least adequate. The "hit" tool, more so than "power" or any other single tool, would be the one I'd bank on, so in that light Sabato was kind of a reach.

Clearly given your last sentence you didn't even read what I wrote. Because I make that same choice.

I already said I applauded those 3 trades. Why do these straw men keep getting set up? I'm talking about what counts as being in a pipeline, not what a FO should do when faced with a losing proposition for the given season. If we'd won in those years then we wouldn't have Duran and Ryan on the roster, seriously impacting assumptions about the (counterfactual) success continuing in 2022, 2023, ... That's having it both ways.

No, it's not, and I said so above. I just don't like to give credit where it's not due. "Oh goody, another losing year! Look at that prospect pipeline grow!" Deadline trades that don't wave the white flag are A-OK in my book, and do count. The example just above of discarding an underperforming bullpen arm, which the Dodgers seemed to regard (correctly as it turns out) as a rebound candidate, is a great example.

Maybe I should be writing rom-coms or dramedies.

Does being on Cedar Rapids and Wichita amount to playing in the Styx?