What’s with FS1 and their useless strike box? It’s practically invisible. You might as well not even have one.
It seems like every other broadcast has a useful one.
And they seem to talk less about missed ball/strike calls. Maybe they don’t want to piss off the MLB.
At the end of the 5th inning of game 2 in their ALDS, the Blue Jays have outscored the Yankees by a total of 22 to 1.
If you thought yesterday was brutal….
I am sick to my stomach. Against the Jays, my Yanks look as bad as my NY Giants against everyone.
I was hoping the Mariners would eliminate NY. But this is fun too
Well, well…the Yankees show signs of life!
I don’t think it’s going to be enough though.
Agreed.
ALDS-1 isn’t over yet, despite the dual spankings in Toronto. I remain nervous.
Trey Yesavage’s performance today was simply unprecedented; there isn’t any comparable thing, ever, to a guy pitching in his fourth major league game, in the PLAYOFFS, doing something like that. He looked like Pedro Martinez out there.
Good ballgame tonight in Seattle. Mariners tie the series 1-1 with a 3-2 win.
You and me both. Especially given the Yankees’ restrictions on who can get tickets (basically, no Canadian fans need apply), I hope that the Blue Jays can remain focused and professional in front of fans who will make it plain that they hate the Jays.
That’s likely true (I don’t have time to really dig in and see if there might be previous examples).
What’s amazing, to me, is that we did have something not too dissimilar just a few days ago with Cam Schilttler. That was only his 15th MLB game ever, and his line was just as good, if not better, than Yesavage’s. And that was a win-or-go-home game.
The pitching talent these days is just mind-boggling for guys like me that grew up watching the game in the 90s and 2000s. We had Pedro and Clemens and Unit and Maddux, but now every single reliever (and most of the starters!) sit in the high-90s with wipeout off speed pitches. It’s a totally different level.
I have been a big proponent of timelining when it comes to comparing players from different eras, but I have considered that to be almost wholly based on shifting demographics (roster depth) and not differences in training and biomechanics and such. Honus Wagner or Lefty Grove had no chance to benefit from modern training and optimized swings and pitching motions.
But if you compare the game from say just the 1970’s, a mere 50 years ago, there really isn’t any comparison at all. Teams routinely trotted out starters with K/9’s below 4.0, often well below that figure. Today there really isn’t any way a starter with a K/9 below 8 or so will exhibit any sustained success or even remain in the rotation for very long; relievers below 10/9 also tend to drift to the bottom of the bullpen depth chart.
In other words, if we had time machines and were able to swap players around from one era to another, for most of baseball history I don’t think they (top stars at least) would have TOO difficult a time adjusting, esp. if they get an entire spring training or even full season to get all up to speed rather than just getting dumped into a setting with which they are totally unfamiliar.
Now tho-drop a whole 2025 pitching staff into 1975, and their stats would blast through the roof, several no hitters a season, a third or more games being shutouts, microscopic ERAs, K/9’s over 14 maybe even close to 20.
Bring a 1975 staff into today and same thing in reverse: massively lit up every night, etc. I don’t think much could be done in terms of retraining them either, because for their entire careers their bodies have adjusted to a more sedate pace and trying to crank up the velocity would just result in a bunch of injuries.
In a lot of ways it is now a game with which I am not very familiar.
I have it on good authority that strikeouts are fascist.
Dumb baseball question - not worth its own thread:
Why is it that most baseball players, right after making a play, promptly then zip a pass to someone totally unrelated to the play? For instance, the 3rd baseman catching a fly ball, then promptly hurling a pass to the shortstop or 2nd baseman (who had nothing to do with the play) instead of throwing the ball to the pitcher so the pitcher can re-use the ball for the next pitch. Or a catcher catching a ball, then zipping a pass to an unrelated player. Is it just stress relief, or some habit? Fun?
I’ve pondered this and sometimes it comes off as arrogance. Like get this ball outta here, fucking scrub.
It’s called throwing the ball ‘around the horn’, and it’s done after an out is recorded when there are no runners on base. It’s something I (and probably millions of other boys) learned when first playing organized baseball.
Pertaining to throwing the ball around the infield for practice and/or show; said of the pattern in which the ball is thrown from catcher to third baseman to shortstop to second baseman to first baseman, after the first or second out has been made and nobody is on base. The custom of throwing the ball around the infield is an old one, perhaps dating to 1877 when the Chicago White Stockings were on tour. In Dec. 1970, Lenny Anderson of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked Casey Stengel about the custom: “They were doing it in the fall of 1912 when I went to the big leagues.”
Revisiting this, FS1 has other issues. Their commentators kind of suck. At the end of the second Mariners game, they talked about how it was a thrilling “come from behind win” for the Mariners.
Despite the fact that the Mariners scored 2 runs early on 2 different solo HRs from Jorge Polanco, and led 2-0 all the way until the bottom of the 8th when Matt Brash allowed 2 runs to the Tigers to tie it up, before Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez combined to get an RBI in the bottom of the 8th for the eventual winning 3-2 score. At no point in that game did the Tigers have a lead, so there was no “come from behind win” unless you consider breaking a tie to count (in which case every baseball game ever is a “come from behind win” since each games starts in a 0-0 tie).
This network is just so bad. That was far from their only dumb comment and misinformation, but it seemed the most egregious to me.
Ah OK thanks.
And you’ll notice that the patterns are different and depend on where the out was recorded, but the patterns always end at third base, who then throws the ball to the pitcher. So the pitcher only always looks to 3B for the ball. To make it easy (easier) on him.