As the title suggests, this thread is for anything about baseball, past, present or future.
As the title suggests, this thread is for anything about baseball, past, present or future.
One little story that came and went that I thought was kind of amusing was about Goose Gossage being banned from the Yankees training camp this year after being there the last couple of years. He was banned because of numerous comments basically disparaging some of the trends in modern baseball like the one-inning reliever and the reliance on newfangled metrics etc. Goose is unapologetically old school, let's put it that way.
When old Goose learned that he was not welcome this year he lit into Brian Cashman and said Cash had no balls.
One of the things that occurred to me was, can you imagine if something similar happened with the Red Sox? Say for example Pedro Martinez went a little funny in the head and started calling Dave Dombrowski a big pussy? That would get quite a bit of attention in the Boston media, I think. But the Gossage-Cashman thing went away quickly. The New York baseball media is actually pretty low-key compared to ours.
I watched the MLB Network documentary on the amazing 1941 season that started out with DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak and ended with Williams hitting .406 by going 6 for 8 on the final day of the season. There were a lot of good clips and interviews with Ted. I must say this documentary gave me a little different perspective on Williams, who I had formed an image of as being this kind of grumpy, unhappy guy whose relationship with the Boston fans ended up as a sour one. They showed the famous clip of him homering on the last at-bat of his career at Fenway and refusing to acknowledge the fans who wanted him to come out of the dugout and wave to them.
But the clips of the young Williams from 1941 showed him with a lot of big smiles, looking like a kid having the time of his life. There's another famous clip of him hitting a walk-off home run in the 1941 All Star Game and practically skipping around the bases with joy. The All Star Game was a big deal then.
There's a nice little story from Bob Costas. Costas said he was talking to the older Williams and said something like this: 'You know that character that John Wayne played in all his movies? That character was you. But you played that guy in real life!'
Costas says Williams looked at him and said in his typical gruff way (but with maybe a little twinkle in his eye), 'Yeah...I know.'
I think it might have more to do with the fact that NYC fans and media kind of expect people to act like unmitigated assholes. "Acting like an unapologetic douchebag for even the smallest reason" is the official sport of New York City (and I think it might actually be on the seal of the state of New Jersey).
Goose also isn't Pedro. Goose has always had a dinkish side to him and it bit him in the ass while playing with NYY and now it will bite him in his retirement. He fails to understand that analytics by nerds with glasses actually helps select the players best suited to succeed at the major league level. If he wants to be a dinosaur, fine. If he wants to bash the analytics guy who happens to run the club, it will get him banned
Hal sucks
So Rich Eisen is saying that MLB is considering a change in how baseball will be played in the 9th inning.
The idea is to allow the manager of the team that is losing in the 9th to send Batters up in any order that he chooses. In this way the best players will decide the game.
So they say.
What do you folks think of this idea?
"Hating the Yankees like it's a religion since 94'" RIP Mike.
"It's also a simple and indisputable fact that WAR isn't the be-all end-all in valuations, especially in real life. Wanna know why? Because an ace in run-prevention for 120 innings means more often than not, a sub-standard pitcher covering for the rest of the IP that pitcher fails to provide. You can't see value in a vacuum when a player does not provide full-time production."
No. No no no no no no no no no no no. Non, nyet, nein, nej, nei, nao, and ghobe', no no no no no. That's the worst idea I've heard since last year when they suggested starting extra innings with a free baserunner. I'm all for progress in certain areas of the game. Getting calls correct with replay is fine by me. Limiting mound visits is fine by me, because it does not fundamentally alter what the game is about. Abandoning the lineup structure most emphatically does.
"Hating the Yankees like it's a religion since 94'" RIP Mike.
"It's also a simple and indisputable fact that WAR isn't the be-all end-all in valuations, especially in real life. Wanna know why? Because an ace in run-prevention for 120 innings means more often than not, a sub-standard pitcher covering for the rest of the IP that pitcher fails to provide. You can't see value in a vacuum when a player does not provide full-time production."
Let's just let the same guy bat repeatedly, subbing with pinch-runners. Imagine a ninth-inning game with David Ortiz batting six times in a row, how cool would that have been? Or maybe we could just start every inning after the sixth with the bases loaded.
So because a team is losing they get a random advantage for no reason in the 9th?
Here's a pretty good piece by Vaccaro on these new ideas for speeding up baseball:
https://nypost.com/2018/02/22/why-ar...e-first-place/
Here's his comment on this latest one:
But the new apex (or maybe low-pex) was reached thanks to an anonymous baseball executive who texted radio host Rich Eisen the other day, suggesting a new rule that a team trailing in the ninth inning could bypass its batting order and simply send up whomever it wishes. The idea quickly went viral and rapidly caused instant widespread outrage, a trial balloon that quickly turned into the Hindenburg.