Well, the calendar has turned yet again and now it is July. An important month as we head toward the trade deadline and teams need to decide if they’re buyers or sellers. And, of course, endless ESPN hype over the boring home run derby.
ESPN gets their fantasy with the Red Sox vs Yankees tonight for Sunday night baseball. I wonder what the over/under is if the broadcast crew mentions the names of the two starting pitchers more often than Lebron James?
They better, ESPN is hard enough to watch to start with. If they blather about the prima-donna of a different sport, I’ll follow the game on the internet instead.
Man, Reds hit ANOTHER grand salami in back to back games against Milwaukee to bring it to 8-0 over the Brew Crew. This Reds team is getting fun to watch. The offense is there and now the pitching is shoring up too. Who would have thought that Matt Harvey would resurrect himself here?
So almost half way through the season and the Reds:
Lead all of MLB in grand slams this season with 9
Have the NL’s leading RBI generator in Suarez (60 RBI)
Have the NL’s batting average leader in Gennett (.332)
Have 9th most RBI’s as a team in baseball (367 RBI)
2nd highest on base percentage in the MLB with .336
6th best team batting average in MLB with .257
Have the best record in baseball since June 10th
…and meanwhile they have the 25th ranked team ERA but that number is shrinking…
The Aarons have 3 homers already vs. Red Sox. Price is gone sadly.
The Sunday game was a whole lot more fun to watch than the Saturday game. Take the runs from all 3 games and redistribute and you could have had 3 decent games. Instead you get three blowouts. Nice to see Kyle H get his first career hit, a homer at that.
Stanton finally heating up, he hit a single that was harder hit than most homers. Ditto Judge’s hit right past the pitcher’s head. We may need to get a rule that pitchers can pitch behind a screen like they do in BP.
As far as I can tell, 19-year-old rookie Juan Soto is the only Nat worthy of an all-star vote. Which says a lot.
Cleveland batted around in the 8th inning of yesterday’s game against Oakland without making an out. They also hit eleven doubles in the game.
I’m trying to figure out why I’m still watching the Dodgers-Pirates 17-1 blowout. The game’s been on for three hours and it’s only the top of the seventh.
Well, only 'cause you don’t vote for pitchers.
Scott Boras is now publically whining that MLB should ban defensive shifts, I assume because he thinks his beloved Bryce Harper is being hurt by it and can make more money (and therefore Boras makes more money) if he can keep pulling the ball into fewer fielders. I think maybe poor little Bryce should learn to just hit the other way now and then if the shift hurts his little feewings so much.
Well, how many hitters *are *trying to go the other way against the shift, or even bunt into it? It was predicted, when Joe Maddon popularized it against David Ortiz and after it spread from there, that hitters would adjust, but it really hasn’t.
The announcers on an MLB Network game recently were discussing that, with the point that Manfred wants the game to adjust itself, but is about to recognize that it isn’t happening and that a rule change may be needed. The one he has in mind is that all infielders would have to have at least one foot on the dirt.
Today’s game is strikeouts and homers, not for the first time in history either, and if that means a less attractive product for a business in the entertainment industry, then changes will be made. Nothing new or surprising about it.
Agree 100%. If he would bunt down the third-base line, he’d be hitting .350 (and the Nats would be more than one game over .500). But I guess that’s beneath him (and evidently managers these days can’t tell “superstars” what to do).
The massive defensive shift looks weird, but if it works it works. I don’t want to hear whining from hitters getting paid millions of dollars a year who can’t learn to hit the other way or bunt.
Also, if they want to speed the game up, get rid of the DH.
Or just add an automatic out every ninth at bat. Speed it up even more.
If your pitcher is an automatic worthless out, both he and your team is doing something wrong.
That game set a Dodger record: Los Angeles’ order batted around in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings, marking the first time the club had ever done so in three consecutive frames.
Yeah, and the something wrong is that you’re not using a DH.
Now that the team on the field can intentionally walk a batter just by saying so, not bothering with the motions, why can’t the team at bat give up an out just by saying so, without the pitcher having to go through *those *motions?
The DH is an abomination and the single worst thing about the American League.
Just because baseball didn’t have it in George Will’s youth? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
The AL is not the exception. All of baseball uses the DH here in the 21st century, except for one league still stuck in the dead ball era.