If having a mic on caused Peña to misplay that, Bregman must have had about 10 mics on him.
There’s an even bigger cock-up here: the official scorer awarded McNeil a hit on the play.
It’s kinda hard for infielders to “communicate” when one of them is busy “communicating” with the announcing booth.
I watched the clip - Peña wasn’t communicating with either the booth or with Bregman once the pitch was thrown. Bregman, for that matter, didn’t make any effort to communicate either.
It was Bregman’s job to call off Peña, and he failed to do so. It was Peña’s job to call for it if he was going to catch it, which he didn’t do.
I think the Hernandez error a few weeks was - if Hernandez was receiving audio during the play - far more likely to be due to the mic. The announcer said something right as Hernandez attempted to field the ball, which could have been extremely distracting.
Today the Cubs beat the Brewers 5-3 in Milwaukee. A number of fans trying to leave the ballpark left a bit more rapidly than they anticipated.
I have to point out that I really like this.
I’ve said this before, but a cool feature of the 1980s was that teams had different approaches. There was a wider variety of strategy. The ultimate example was the 1982 World Series, which pitted the Brewers, who hit 216 homers but aside from Paul Molitor didn’t steal many bases, against the Cardinals, who hit 67 home runs all year but ran nonstop.
It has always been a natural part of baseball evolution that offense tends towards home runs and walks. The best way to score runs and win games, absent a force to the contrary, is to get on base and hit home runs. It beats running or bunting or the hit and run. Once the home run became a part of baseball stolen bases vanished for decades, coming back in the 1960s and 1970s because there were forces that made it attractive - bigger multi purpose stadiums that were harder to hit homers in, faster ballplayers, and artificial turf, which you can run faster on. But some of those things started going away, plus teams learned to select strikeout pitchers, so steals started dying off again.
So I like rules that make basestealing more common, and I think basestealing will increase going forward. If you can steal bases at an 80 percent clip, you should definitely steal more bases.
Same. It’s a lot more fun than just focusing on nothing but homers.
Didn’t the sabremetric guys, at least for a time, assert that unless your steal percentage was just about 100%, statistically you’d lose more runs than gained by stealing? To be more specific, stealing might be a good strategy if you need exactly one run (say, in the bottom of the ninth), but overall losing the out 25% of the time minimized your run total compared to staying put.
Am I misremembering? Have the statistics been reevaluated?
I think it was around 85%.
Dodgers - Giants yesterday was fun! Tied 7 - 7 going into the 11th.
Completely agreed. As we’d discussed several times here over the past years, the combination of reliance on home runs, increases in strikeout rates, and the dearth of baserunning/steals had made baseball into a static sport to watch, with not much interesting happening until a home run (or an extra-base hit) was hit.
No. That has never been true.
The break even point has always been thought to be around 70 percent. (It does vary a little depending on context, but not that much.) That’s been the consensus since sabermetrics started being a thing.
There’s a scene in Moneyball where a player says to Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), “you pay me to steal bases.”
Beane replies, “I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second.”
Could that be what you’re thinking of?
It might be, or something like it. My hazy memory of when I first read about sabermetrics is that OBP was much more valuable than people thought (me included; I mean, who cares about boring old walks?), and that outs were precious and should not be squandered, an obvious point that was covered with much more expertise.
Clearly the message was muddled in the intervening years. 