In fact the White Sox have a 3 game buffer.
The Nats are actually on the outside looking in based on tie breakers at the moment.
I was assuming they had the tiebreaker due to beating Arizoa and San Diego head to head. There’s a big logjam right now. Still, I’ll take it since they were expected to lose around a hundred.
Philadelphia outfielder Johan Rojas is nearing the end of his suspension for PEDs. However, he won’t play for the remainder of the season, as he’s suffered a torn UCL. He’s expected to be ready for spring training.
Wow, the Nationals bullpen coughed up a 9-1 lead in two innings (and they scored a 10th run in the top of the ninth). That can happens when the powers that be decided to roll with a bullpen with zero (0) pitchers with even one full year of major league experience. It’s not as if they had anyone in the minors breaking the door down. There was no way of predicting the offense would suddenly transform into one of the league’s best, so I guess they’d decided it was better to have a few more millions of dollars in their pockets that to win 70 games instead of 60. How they’ve managed to stay over .500 with a so-so starting staff and exactly one proven reliever is beyond me.
The answer is earlier in your post, they have great hitters who make up for middle of the road pitchers. Makes for exciting games!
The Nats seem determined to be average. They’ve been at (or within a few games) of .500 for weeks, and they are 5 and 5 in the last ten games.
I’d compare him to Gretzky, but that’s kind of a weird comp. Gretzky still holds every scoring record; he was an extreme outlier, ludicrously extreme in terms of standard deviations, in the art of scoring.
Ohtani is not the greatest hitter of all time. He is like, say, Johnny Mize, but in half a career. He is as a pitcher nowhere near the greatness yet of, say, Dave Stieb, because again he’s got a fraction of a career as a pitcher. What’s odd about him is that while is is not the GOAT, he is very great at two entirely different jobs. He is not comparable to Gretzky; he is comparable to a hockey player who for the same team is both a full time forward equal in greatness to Teemu Selanne and a goalie playing 35 games at the level of Curtis Joseph, or a quarterback as great as Warren Moon who also plays Pro Bowl level linebacker. His is a unique type of greatness in all of baseball history.
Jacob Misiorowski of the Brewers:
9 IP
27 batters faced
1 hit
0 runs
0 walks
15 strikeouts
And one of his pitches was 104.5 MPH, fastest pitch of all-time for any starting pitcher.
Miz has been on fire since the start of May. In eight starts through May and June:
- 57.1 innings pitched
- 1 earned run
- 19 hits
- 80 strikeouts
- 9 walks
- 0.16 ERA
- 0.488 WHIP
Dodgers pitcher Yamamoto had a perfect game through 7 innings. A Mookie error ended that in the 8th. It also ended a streak of 45 batters retired in a row by Yamamoto. Then he gave up a homer two pitches into the 9th to end the no-hitter. A heartbreaker, but an amazing outing for him.
Bo Bichette opting out?
The Nats’ Nasim Nunez has triples in two consecutive at-bats tonight. I wonder how often that has happened.
Probably not that often. The record for triples in one game is three, shared by several players.
In 1958, Roberto Clemente hit triples in three consecutive at-bats. Perhaps others did too but that’s all the time I had for googling.
The Royals have been abysmal on offense this season. But they just finished setting a franchise record by hitting five doubles in one inning against the Cardinals. There was also a 2-base error in the inning, and Bobby Witt took second on a throw after his single. Seven Royals reached base, and they all ended up at second base. KC scored 6 in the inning and lead 7-2 after two.
Barring a hell of a second half he’s not getting $40 million a year elsewhere.
Bryce Harper hit for the cycle for the first time in his career. Not to be outdone, Kyle Schwarber hit 3 homeruns, 2 of the homeruns were in the same inning. With both of those things happening in the same game you might guess correctly that the Phillies won, 15-3 vs the Mets.
And Harper wasn’t the first to hit for the cycle this season. Pete Crow-Armstrong accomplished the feat the other day, when Chicago beat Colorado 5-4.
To my admitted amazement this was not the first time in MLB history that teammates have had a 3-home game and a cycle in the same game; Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri did it in 1932.
Cycles happen around 3-4 times a year, typically, but it gusts up and down. In 2017 there were seven.
Cleveland opened their current stadium, which used to be called Jacobs Field but is now something corporate and stupid, in 1994. No one, home or visitor, has ever hit for the cycle there. The most cycle-happy ballpark, quite logically, is Coors Field, which has seen 18 cycles, more than any other existing park except Fenway, which it’s tied with and Fenway’s been around a lot longer.
(It’s Progressive Field) but more importantly, it’s a very tough triples park.
The Cubs/Blue Jays game was rained out yesterday. After the game was postponed, the Cubs went on the road to open a series against the Mets in New York City. Their game today was rained out.
According to Google, this is the first time that a team has had two successive games postponed due to rain in two different cities since the Detroit Wolverines vs. St. Louis Browns (October 20–21, 1887).
The football and basketball fans can no longer hold their fun little 20-0 and 81-0 games above our heads. I present to you: