He leads the NL, and leads it in batting average, too.
Everything should be archived and available to watch at some point - but I’m sorry, I don’t know how quickly they’re put in there. At the latest games can be watched the next day.
Semi-hijack: Tennessee beat Texas A&M for their first college baseball championship. It was a very good series, and a look at who might be playing for your favorite team in a few years.
A few days ago, the Nats lost a game on a 3-2 count in a tied game by pitch clock violation.
See post #76
He leads all of MLB in batting average at the moment. He is .001 better than #2 (Jurickson Profar of the Padres). Though as close as they are, that can change at any time. 
The Cubs blew another 9th-inning lead and lost to San Francisco 5-4 yesterday night. Their starting pitching this season has been great, but not much else has been any good at all.
Well, you gotta hand it to my Nats. Now when I say “they find new ways to lose”, I can point to a literal example.
The Brewers are leading the majors in stolen bases, with 113, after Christian Yelich stole a base in today’s win over the Rangers.
But, the neat part is that they’ve only been caught stealing 19 times, giving them an 86% success rate.
Second baseman Brice Turang is leading the team with 27 steals, and has an 87% success rate. (He’s also leading the team in WAR.)
The pickoff rules have caused stolen base percentage to soar. The MLB AVERAGE is 78 percent, and last year it was 80 percent, which is historically unprecedented.
Well, the rules are part of it; the other thing is that teams, thanks to sabermetrics, just run smarter now, picking on specific pitchers and catchers and not running if it’s less than 70 percent likely to succeed. Back in the day they just ran all the time. In the high steal heyday of the 1980s the average was more like 67 percent. I’ve said this before and will say it again, but it just made zero sense at all to ever run on a catcher like Gary Carter, and yet they did, more than once a game, and it was just throwing runs away to do that. One year he threw out 75 men out of 161 attempts. Carter’s arm, by itself, was worth 2, 3 wins a year in some seasons. They weren’t QUITE as insane against Ivan Rodriguez, attempting only 60-80 times a year or so, and yet the correct number was clearly zero, because in his prime he was throwing out upwards of 60 percent of them so why even try? It was just fucking insane to run on I-Rod. But they did. It was almost ideological.
Today, Ivan Rodriguez or Gary Carter would probably see fewer than 20 attempts a year, but a bad throwing catcher like Alejandro Kirk will see attempts at rates comparable to the 1980s.
The Mets swept a two-game series with the Yankees to reach .500.
May not sound like much, but the team looked like this was impossible after their terrible May. After a team meeting called by Francisco Lindor, the offense woke up in a big way, scoring in bunches every game. All the regulars (except Jeff McNeil) ended their slumps and are raking.
There have also been additions. Catcher Francisco Alverez returned from the IL and loopks like budding superstar. He’s hitting .415/.500/.732/1.232 since coming back. And is getting raves from the pitching staff for his pitch calling. The entire staff is pitching much better with him behind the plate. The team is 22-3 in his last 25 games he played.
Also, the team sent down their struggling third baseman Bret Baty and brought up Mark Vientos, whose been giving them the best offense at third base since David Wright retired. And DH J.D. Martinez has been hitting like an all-star.
And the biggest factor is Grimace. The McDonald’s mascot threw out a first pitch and the team’s gone 11-2 since.
On average, the rate of stolen bases is substantially higher this season (0.73 steals/team/game in 2024, vs. 0.51 in 2022, the last season prior to the pickoff rule change) – that’s a 42% increase, but it’s substantially less than a steal per game.
The rate is now essentially where it was in the '80s (e.g., 0.75 in '82, 0.79 in '83, 0.72 in '84) – but, as you note, the rate of attempts was higher then, as teams tried to steal in situations where modern sabermetrics would have told them that they shouldn’t even try.
There’s a handful of teams which are really running: Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Washington all have over 100 steals, with no other team over 81, and the league average being only 58. The Brewers’ new manager, Pat Murphy, is clearly focusing more on stealing than Craig Counsell had – at exactly the halfway point of their season, the team already has nearly as many steals (113) as they did for the whole of 2023 (129).
Glad about the pickoff rule changes. Was tired of pitchers throwing to first base endlessly. By the way are there any rules on preventing some mirror-like object being put in a place (like, behind the catcher) at an angle that would enable to pitcher to see (without turning around) what the runner is doing at first base and how far off the base he is?
You could probably sell that idea to the Astros.
Yet another use for a garbage can lid, if sufficiently shiny.
Yet again, a fielder screws up after being miked up for a stupid, unnecessary in-game interview.
Time to stop doing this stupid shit, even if greedy ballplayers like the idea.
It’s not greedy to do things to make money when it’s your job. It’s professional.
The video player at that link is quite annoying. During the replay, just at the critical moment, text pops up saying “coming up 4 seconds…” and blocks the view.
Attention web developers, do not block what I’m watching now to tell me what I might watch next. If the next video is really that great, I can wait four seconds to see it.
They get paid 10K to wear a microphone for a single inning? It would be hard to say no to that, even in a profession with a minimum salary of 740K. Still, it adds absolutely nothing to the game.
I wouldn’t call the results of that play “professional”, but YMMV.