If you want to be pedantic, which you seem to do, the thread is about the return of the season, not the season itself.
Baseball threads and discussions have always taken off on tangents - there’s too much time between pitches to not muse about other aspects of the game. But they’re usually short lived, like a pitcher’s chances at the plate. In fact, there was a poster who was creating multiple threads about odd little questions about baseball, and the general consensus is that people wanted him to post them in this omnibus thread, rather than make separate ones. I’m sure the EW discussion has died out - like all tangents eventually do.
Well maybe Kay just a little, but Paul O’Neill and David Cone were great.
All this talk about players hitting .400+ this year, why bother? No average stat is going to mean much as the season will pretty much be a third of a season.
Though on that note DJLeMahieu really looks locked in. Even picked up his first triple of the year last night.
Because it’s fun and noteworthy. I don’t think anyone will forget that this season is being played underneath a giant asterisk, including the players themselves. A lot of craziness can happen when you shrink the sample size down this much. Baseball could use a little positive craziness for once.
So apparently no one has actually won the batting title in both leagues. Big Ed Delahanty was credited with it when I was a kid, but I learned last night from Michael Kay that baseball corrected some stats from his AL batting title year and he actually came in second.
So if DJ does win the AL, while carrying an asterisk, he’ll be the first player to win in both leagues.
Interesting, Wiki still lists him for winning in both leagues.
For some reason I thought Buckner had won in both leagues, but that’s not right at all.
I’m not sure I’d put that big of an asterisk on something like that. Yes, hitting .400 will be fluky, but winning a title is winning against the regular competition. And yeah - I think he can do it. He’s an amazing contact hitter. The biggest obstacle is that pitching in the East is pretty tough.
A few teams are now a third of the way through this odd season.
So the Cubs are 13-3 for a MLB leading .813 winning pct. Is this for real? They already have a 6.5 game lead in the NL Central. Marlins are .667 but only 8-4 having lost so many games to their collective stupidity. Colorado is also .667 but 12-6 and the Dodgers are .650 13-7.
In the AL: Oakland 13-6 .684 (4 games up) Yankees 12-6 .667 (1 game up) Tampa 12-8 .600 Twins 12-7 .632
As hypothesized yesterday, today’s Cardinals/White Sox game has been pushed to tomorrow, when it is to be one-half of a doubleheader. The Cardinals are slated to play the Cubs next week, after the weekend series against the Sox, with doubleheaders scheduled for Monday and Wednesday (so, eight games in five days).
Also, rather than flying to Chicago today, the Cards are looking at making players rent cars and drive individually, in an attempt to limit the team’s exposure to contagious people.
Given the team’s recent problems with coronavirus, it seems to me that making the players rent cars might be an attempt to limit the exposure of the flying public to the plague ship Cardinals.
I used to fly Cards charters for the airline a lot. They always traveled on a chartered jet (727 or 757). We’d carry the team, the coaches, and some management hangers-on. Sometimes some press people or a high-roller’s wife too.
Ground transportation was by chartered buses that pulled up adjacent to the airplane. They’d never enter the terminal building or interact with the public at any point.
That was MLB, NFL, NHL standard stuff. Every team in every league did it this way. We didn’t do NBA, but I assume they did the same.
I can’t say what’s being done in Aug 2020, but the idea of them renting 50 cars and driving exposes them to 50 rental car counters. Sounds more infectious than the chartered bus and jet method.
The rest of this weekend’s Reds/Pirates series has been postponed, as a Cincinnati player tested positive for COVID yesterday; the test results apparently came out after the two teams played yesterday.
Cardinals rookie Roel Ramirez suffers a tough major league debut, entering in the fifth inning and giving up four consecutive home runs to the White Sox.