That was a ridiculous call. I have NEVER seen a runner called out for interference in that circumstance. Callaspo could have fielded the ball behind Escobar and made the play; Escobar couldn’t reasonably have been blamed for not leaving his baseline to avoid Callaspo (intereference doesn’t require deliberate hindrance, but you have to at least have the runner legitimately interfere.)
But then, Bob Davidson has been a joke for years now.
La Russa had the pitcher bat 8th last night.
From what I’ve heard, his reasoning is that, that way, Albert Pujlos is guaranteed to come to bat in the first inning but effectively bats cleanup after that. That, and/or it’s a way of shaking things up a bit when necessary.
Speaking of which, damn, the Cardinals have been frustrating to watch so far this season.
The O’s have had 40 quality starts in 61 games since Showalter took over. There wasn’t much doubt he’d turn things around there, but damn…
And Boston has had 1 quality start all year.
God, announcers can be stupid.
Every game so far they’ve been blathering about how the Blue Jays are a different team because, by God, they’re gonna run more! That was the problem last year! It had nothing to do with the fact they couldn’t get on base; the problem was running, and they’re going to run more! It’s great!
Well, looky looky, Jose Bautista just got picked off again. The Jays are throwing away at least at out a game through stupidly aggressive baserunning, and they’ve actually been LUCKY in this regard; they’ve had an unusual number of runners bailed out by bad rundowns. But the announcers never say a word; when someone gets nailed, they just breezily mention it and within an inning or two talk about how wonderful it is the Jays are running more, and never mind the inning they threw away. Legitimately good baserunners don’t get picked off every three games.
I like the running game too but** you need guys who can run**. Toronto basically has one fast guy; Rajai Davis. Let him run.
I’m not a big fan of some of the things that the Blue Jays have been doing on offense. Those announcers keep going on and on about how, in the first game of the season, the Blue Jays pulled off a successful double steal with Bautista at bat, and how unexpected and wonderful it was.
What they never mention is how Bautista ended up walked in that at-bat, so the Jays took that huge risk with their big home-run guy at the plate … for nothing.
To hear the idiots at Sportsnet talk, stealing a couple more bases is going to fix all of the problem with the Jays’ offense this year. It’s ridiculous. The Jays #1 problem on offense last year is that they never got on base. When you already have problems getting people on base, risking them once they manage to get there seems counter-productive.
I don’t mean to pollute the thread with Jays talk, but man oh man, Aaron Hill looks lost at the plate.
Part of my hopes for the Jays doing okay this year was the assumption that Hill could not possibly be as bad as he was last year, but so far he’s just as bad as he was last year. It’s not just the numbers - Encarnacion and Snider have bad numbers too but they don’t look that bad at the plate. Hill just looks like he’s swinging in desperation; his pitch selection is wholly random and he’s just cutting through air without any regard to where the ball actually is. I’m losing a lot of faith that he can turn it around, and Anthopolous’s decision to decline his option’s looking smart.
I’m mildly pissed with the Tigers right now. Nothing seems to be going well, and cost-cutting measures from the past few years have been shitty, like getting rid of Placido Polanco, for starters, not making a run at Vladimir Guerrerro or trading for Mike Young. The farm system isn’t super stocked, but there are a few gems out there that we can pick up, but they’re not positional players.
Rowr. Jim Leyland has been around for a while and lots of folks are turning on him and wishing him out. Dave Dombrowski? Sure, I guess. I dunno, I know the year will work out just fine, but it’s just frustrating, because there seems to be an arbitrary amount of money that the ownership is willing to spend. Sometimes they seem to want to spend like the big boys, and sometimes they seem to want to wilt from it.
Also, rowr.
I’m excited about the Indians because I am excited about this team, as I have been for the past season or two. I went to the last game of the season by myself last year, and then came home and emailed the local post-game radio guy about how this season is going to be SO AWESOME with Asdrubal, Santana, Hafner and Grady all back and healthy.
We don’t even have Grady yet and Choo is not playing at his peak but as a team we are wicked awesome - and that is thanks so far to solid hitting coupled with excellent starting pitching and a bullpen that does not blow leads. Magicsauce!
We swept 2 straight series and won 7 in a row but I am still trepidatious. I will be more “I TOLD YOU SO!” once we meet the O’s next weekend.
Until then, I’m just gonna sit around being happy to not hear so much Tribe doom-and-gloom for a few days. YEAH!
Look on the bright side. You could be a Mariners fan.
sigh
This is true. We need a fucking salary cap.
One of those series sweeps was against the Mariners, so it shouldn’t really count. They’re gonna make a lot of teams look good. It’s gonna be a looooong season in the PNW. At least we have Ichiro and Felix. I have my fingers crossed about Ackley coming up and Guitierrez coming back, but I remember Anderson and Clement not working out. And we gave away Choo for a Baseball Tonight analyst and Adam Jones for a terminally injured pitcher, who while healthy, got hammered today. It’d be really nice if we had those guys still.
You want your worst batter batting as far away from your best batters as possible. The best place to put them to do this is at 8, not 9.
Why? Last year the Mariners had an opening day payroll almost twice that of the Rangers. What good would a salary cap have done them?
Probably something along the idea that a salary cap would force half of the Yankees and Red Sox to play elsewhere, giving the Mariners a shot at some talent.
I can’t see it lasting. I expected the lineup and bullpen to be decent, but the rotation is seriously overachieving right now. And Orlando Cabrera isn’t going to hit .375 all year.
Hats off to Manny Acta, though. It’s weird watching an Indians team ready to play in April. Just look at what Eric Wedge’s Seattle Mariners are doing.
Or maybe break the league up into those teams and cities that will support large payrolls and those that won’t. A salary cap would break baseball as the Union is rather strongly against it. Why does this cry come up every year in almost every baseball thread. It is not happening any time soon and it begins to sound silly after a while.
Also no cap should ever go into place without a floor. Make every team spend between $80 and $120 maybe and you can probably start to get the Union on board a little. Let’s push the ownership of the Pirates too actually give competing a try instead of living on MLB welfare.
Is every Yankees - Red Sox game on ESPN? Or does it just seem that way?
Seriously…the world doesn’t care as much as ESPN (and Fox) thinks we do.
That’s about it.
It’s pretty damned obvious why it comes up every year during baseball season. If you have a ceiling, I don’t see why you can’t have a floor.
I think a salary floor would be a great idea. It would force ownership to actually run a competitive team, not just sit back and let the team die through lack of interest.
This might be true (i’m not convinced), but the difference it makes is so small as to be almost invisible. Also, any benefit from having your worst batter as far away from your best batter as possible would probably be negated by the fact that putting your worst batter 1 place higher in the batting order has the effect, over the course of the season, of giving your worst batter about 18 extra plate appearances. That’s not something you really want to do, in most circumstances.
Anyway, as a general rule, batting order is one of the least important things a baseball manager can mess with. The folks at Baseball Prospectus ran a whole bunch of analysis on this issue for their book Baseball Between the Numbers, and their conclusions could basically be summarized as follows:
(1) lineup order hardly matters, and could probably be picked at random without affecting a team’s chances at winning very much at all
(2) who is in the lineup is much, much more important than where they bat
(3) if you want a system to decide batting order, then batting players in descending order of OBP is probably the best strategy
(4) even in the absolute outlying scenarios, where a player is head and shoulders above everyone else on his team (e.g., Barry Bonds, 2001-2004), moving that player to his optimal place in the lineup only gains about 10 runs (or roughly 1 win) per year for the team.